


What's Love Got To Do With It?

by Garrae



Category: Castle
Genre: Angst, Childhood Memories, F/M, Light Bondage, Light Dom/sub, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-20
Updated: 2014-12-07
Packaged: 2018-02-18 03:22:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 79
Words: 280,053
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2333435
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Garrae/pseuds/Garrae
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A day spent in his company gives her a bad headache and an almost overwhelming desire to hit him. Or shoot him. But under it all she can feel the current tugging at her. Because he's sexy in the bad-boy way that's always turned her on. </p><p>Season 1.   Previously posted in Fanfiction.</p><p>In the beginning, Marlowe created Castle and Beckett. I own nothing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. He's a sinner

She recognises the crime scene instantly.  No question but that someone has copied a tableau from one of her favourite author’s books.  It looks accurate in every detail.  It’s spookily, obsessively weird.  Of course Ryan and Esposito don’t get it.  Beckett’s not sure they read anything beyond the sports pages of the New York Post.  But there are crazed fans of every writer out there: she’s seen wannabe Pattersons, a dozen Brett Easton Ellises.  Normally those sorts of killers end up with an FBI profiling department.  But this one’s landed with her, and it’s a good excuse to reread the books.  Strange, though, usually fan-killers choose the well-known books.  This one must be a serious geek.  If she hadn’t had the best possible alibi, she’d almost have suspected herself.  Except she’d been where she always is, unless (and sometimes even if) she’s asleep: staring at her murder board or at her desk, buried in the bullpen of the Twelfth.  It’s where she’s happiest.

Procedure says she needs to interview the obvious suspect.  Intrigue at the nature of the crime tells her to do it now.  A rapid Google shows her that she will find her subject at a smart hotel, where he’s launching the latest episode of his insanely successful franchise.  It’s the most popular crime writer event in town, because rumour has it that he’s killed off the character and isn’t writing any more.  Vicious rumour has it that he’s blocked.  Beckett wonders if writers with writers’ block might seek inspiration in a rather more direct fashion than simply using their imaginations.  One never expects it, but she can’t discount the possibility.

And under it all, as she goes alone to her cruiser and starts the engine, is the delicate stroke of something else, something a little darker.  She’s always liked the edge in his books, the hints of the darker side of many things.  Strong men, brains and muscle, alpha males.  She’s never met him, because standing in lines at a single signing for three seconds of contact doesn’t count.  And now he’s a possible witness, a possible suspect.  She feels a midnight thrill of expectation.

* * *

 

Rick Castle is bored and petulant.  He’s quarrelled with his agent, he’s fed up with his mother hitting on any silver surfer who isn’t obviously wearing a ring, ( _if they don’t display it they’re fair game, Richard darling_ ) and even his daughter is not providing him with the usual happiness and amazement that she’s his.  Nothing interesting has happened all evening.  He could have his pick of gorgeous women, who’ll – he is sure – do anything for him that he happens to want: there are flocks of them milling around him.  There’s alcohol, and if he were still that stupid there are undoubtedly various illegal substances available.  He wouldn’t even have to try hard.  He can have anything he wants, any way he wants it, and he’s still bored.

And under it all he’s frightened.  He’d got bored with Storm, killed him off before the critics could do it for him.  He knows the last book isn’t quite as good, could see the slow descent into formula writing coming – he’s seen it in many long-running series by others – and took decisive action. 

He’s good at that: decisive actions, when he wants to be.  He doesn’t normally need to: when he’s been a star for twenty years; rich, handsome, everybody’s friend, pack alpha in oh-so-many ways; people just get used to giving him what he wants, and never even think to quibble. 

He’d learned fast, little Ricky Rodgers.  The publishing business doesn’t take prisoners.  He’d learned to read a contract and spot the flaws, negotiate like a corporate lawyer till he could afford his own top-of-the-line attorneys, lay down the law about what he would and wouldn’t do.  No long book tours – a fortnight at most, and only out of school terms, once he had Alexis.  The tightest terms in the industry on his agent and PR rep – they’d screamed blue murder, but he wouldn’t give in.  This is his talent they’re exploiting, and he’s not giving up an iota of it without a hard bargain.

He’d learned in a hard school.  Always on the move, always broke, makes you tough.  Out for what you can get and keep.  Scrounging and scavenging and charming with it, because it’s so much easier to get what you want if people like you.  Theatre people are ruthlessly competitive and egotistical, always trying to be top.  He saw it all, through the eyes of the child he was, and learned.  Be liked, be loved – and always, always, be in control.

He’s got the playboy millionaire CV to go with the persona.  Two marriages, both failed: one for infidelity, (not his.  He keeps his promises.  He may not make many, but he keeps the ones he does.  It’s a matter of pride, or honour.) one for incompatibility.  Sleeping with your agent simply doesn’t work.  She’d thought it would give her more leverage, more control, and found that Richard Castle likes his own control, thank you very much, and wasn’t prepared to surrender any of it to her, in bed or out.  So now it’s soft, pretty women, if he wants them, which is a _lot_ less often than page six makes out; and total control of his own life.  No-one tells him what to do, and only his own conscience keeps him from doing anything he wants, any time he likes.  He’s got long past enough money to buy anything he feels like: he’s got the immense loft in SoHo, a bigger house in the Hamptons, the Ferrari, the trappings of wealth and fame.  And to go with it, the edge of bad boy, a little danger, a little rough, a little hint of darker things.  Just a little hint.  Too much reality might frighten the fans.

Despite it all, the success and the money and the women and the status, he’s bored.  And scared.  He exchanges a few words with his daughter, a joke about the pretty, pink plastic women with pink plastic minds, wanting their cleavage signed, and making it clear that they would be very, very happy to let him do far more than that.  Anything he wants, in fact.  Anything.  He thinks bleakly, snagging another glass of cheap champagne and wishing it was whiskey to drown his fear, that some of them would be a little more uncomfortable than they’d like, if they saw the real Richard Castle, not the charming playboy.

“Mr Castle?”  It’s a clearer, sharper tone than he’s used to, but still, it’s going to be another plastic woman looking for a souvenir: a signature, or a one-night stand.  The first she can have.  The second, not so – Oh.  Ohhhhh.  Wow.  _This_ one can certainly join him for the night.  She’s stunning.  Tall, dark, green eyes.  Ohhh yes.  And there’s something else, an edge he’d like to explore, a quick flicker of arousal in her eyes. 

She’s - interesting.  And he hasn’t been interested in anything for months.

He’s still brandishing the Sharpie, embarking on _where would you like it_?  (anywhere she wants.  He can make her feel so good, any way she wants it.  And later, any way he wants it, when she’s soft and pliant and purring and open.  He gets the feeling she might be adventurous.  That’s fine, so’s he.)

That’s when she pulls out a shield, and he sees the gun on her hip, and he realises that this is not a game right about the point she looks him over with contempt (contempt?  He’s _Rick Castle_.  No-one looks at him like that.  No-one.) and orders him to come with her for questioning about a murder.  No-one’s given him orders for a long time now, either.  He gives orders.  Not that he often needs to, though in certain intimate situations he likes to.  But here he doesn’t have a choice.  Go willingly, or go in handcuffs.  He doesn’t like that, either.  He doesn’t do handcuffs.  Others have done handcuffs for him, when he wanted them to.  On the other hand, this NYPD cop is _seriously_ hot, and he’s famously handsome and charming.  He’ll have her eating out of his hand in no time, and then they can move on to… other things.  It’ll be his turn to give her orders, and hers to answer questions.  Such as _Do you like this?_ And _Want more?_ And similar.  Turnabout is, after all, fair play.  Especially in bed.

He starts to understand that it – she - won’t be that easy when every attempt to flirt is shot down dead.  She’s angry and for some reason he doesn’t understand she’s not only taken an instant dislike to him, she’s making it perfectly obvious.  People – women - just don’t _do_ that to him.  He hasn’t been knocked back in nearly twenty years: it’s he who knocks back.  Well.  Well, well, well.  This Detective Beckett just gets more and more interesting by the moment.  And with every spiky, angry comment she also gets hotter and hotter.  Not just that, she’s evidently got a mind under that edgy, irate shell.  She’s fast.  She might even be as intelligent as he is.  Mmmm.  He’s definitely interested.  And aroused.  Game _on_.

Except it’s not.  Game off, it seems.  She’s done with him, escorts him to the elevator and disposes of him with much the same expression as she’d throw a used Kleenex in the trash.  Now he’s offended.  First contempt, then orders, then coldly aggressive questioning, and now she’s finished with him she’s shoved him out the door and made it clear that if she never sees him again it’ll be ten minutes too late.  Now he’s not just interested, he’s annoyed.  And possibly just a little bit obsessed.  She’s not simply going to get rid of him.  He’s in charge of his life.  What he wants, he gets.  And now he wants this Detective Beckett.

By the time he’s flagged a cab, which takes much longer than he’d like – another irritation, a reminder that he’s not been in control at any point this evening: if he hadn’t been hauled in for questioning there’d have been the usual luxurious limo to take them all home – he’s worked himself into a state of intense ire.  He pours himself the Irish whiskey he’s been waiting for all night, and throws himself into a comfortable chair in the study.  Two sips in it hits him.  Inspiration.  Somewhere in the irritation and annoyance and outright desire, he’s found his new character.  Writers’ block has been demolished, and he’s suddenly fizzing with ideas.  She’s right there in his head, demanding to be written, screaming to come out.   He’s sketching out connections, ideas, sentences, plans: layering on to the picture of Detective Beckett all the nuances he thought he could spot.  _This_ character will be hot.  Intelligent.  Stunning.  Passionate.  And all his.  He’ll mould her to be any way he wants her.  He recognises for an instant that this is wish-fulfilment, born of frustration and desire, and not a little spoilt-child tantrum; but then he shoves that concept away from him and begins.  With every word he writes, he turns the screw of his newest obsession a little tighter. 

By dawn, he has his outline.  By ten, he’s sent it to Black Pawn.  By eleven, Gina’s told him it might work, which is about as close as she ever gets to outright approval at this stage.

And then he has his next brilliant idea.  If someone’s killing using his books as their inspiration – and abruptly he remembers that the irritatingly hot Detective Beckett had clearly recognised one of his early, less-than-excellent (still a best seller, though) efforts.  Hmm.  Fangirl?  And she _still_ felt able to treat him like that?  His irritation and need to prove her wrong edge up another notch – then _obviously_ he should offer his assistance.  Who else, after all, would be able to provide the level of detail that New York’s Finest would like?  And it will help him with the background for this story, and – emphatically _not_ incidentally – he’ll get to be around Detective Beckett.   He’ll make her see that she should want him.  He pulls out his phone, looks up a particular contact.

“Bob?  Hey.  It’s Rick.” 

He’ll have her.  One way or another.  He always gets what he wants.  And no-one treats him as if he’s nothing.  Not any more.

* * *

 

Beckett is particularly irritated with life when she disposes of the great Richard Castle: playboy millionaire, tabloid darling, best-selling novelist - and arrogant idiot who clearly thinks he’s just got to smile and be smarmy for women to fall at his feet.  Disappointing, really.  She’d thought, for a few seconds, that he might be… interesting.  That there might be some edge.  But then he’d started to put the moves on and honestly?  Waste of time.  He’d been too sloppy, too casual, too _I-can-have-anyone-with-no-effort-at-all_.  Attitude like that, he’d be selfish in bed, too.  So she’d indulged her inner bitch-cop and grilled him hard.  He hadn’t liked it.  She’d seen it sparking in those baby-blue eyes.  Not a man used to being turned down.  Not a man used to being told what to do by others.  Definitely not a man used to being on the bottom.  Even if he had said _I’d be happy to let you spank me_.  Somehow she doubts that. She suspects it might be the other way round, and just for an instant wishes she’d wiped the smile off his smirking face by saying so.  Shame.  It could have been good.  He’d have been just her type, if he hadn’t had such an uncharming personality.  She regrets the lack of redeeming features for a moment. 

She likes big men, bulky frames, some muscle.  Someone she’d have to work to take down in a fight.  She likes bad boys, too.  There was a time she was a very bad girl, and she met a number of very bad boys.  She’s dabbled in the dark side, paddled in the shallow end of some interesting pools.  She’d been – adventurous – for a while.  Till her life changed.  She’s worked through that, a year and more of therapy had eased the majority of the pain, though not taken away the desire to solve the case.  She’s been single for a long time, now, and hasn’t missed it: herself, and her dreams, are enough.  Still, it’s a shame.  He’d have been just her type.  Even some intelligence, even if he was doing his best to hide it.  Oh well.  Never mind. 

She’ll never have to see him again.

* * *

 

When she discovers that her Captain has got a consultant in on this case she’s a tad ticked off.  She and her team are the best in the precinct, and they don’t need some shrink profiler to help.  Still, she respects Montgomery more than any other cop, and if he thinks it’s necessary, well, likely he has good reason.  She thinks that right up till the moment the _consultant_ swaggers in, smirking scruffily and with infuriating self-satisfaction.  Montgomery won’t even let her protest.  Her fury is stoked when _Mr Castle_ – she’ll drown him in formality, if she can’t get rid of him – whispers in her ear, too low for anyone else to hear.

“No-one treats me like you did and gets away with it, _Detective_ Beckett.”  She shrugs, insolently, coolly.

“That supposed to worry me?  You’ll need to try a lot harder than that.  Criminals worry me.  You,” she looks him up and down slowly, “clearly can’t even handle a razor.  I don’t think I’ve anything to worry about.”  Although on the slow once-over, she’s noticed a _lot_ about his physique.  Especially south of the belt.

“You’ll see.”  His tone drops into one he’s clearly used successfully on a lot of women.  “You’ll want to be – friends.”  _Friends._   Yeah, sure.  Is that what the cool kids call it this week?  Though the voice would cause angels to sin.  She looks him up and down again, not failing to put on an expression of boredom.

“I don’t think you have a big enough claim to be _my_ friend, Mr Castle.  I prefer a little more substance.”  She turns her shoulder and summons the team.  The case requires her attention.  The civilian does not.

* * *

 

Castle is severely unimpressed with Detective Beckett’s lack of pleasant reaction to him, and rapidly returns to his previous state of annoyance.  He’s got plenty substance, and many women have been very impressed by his claims.  He’s well read, well travelled, and full of interesting conversation.  He’s quickly reaching the point where he’s firmly intent on proving to Detective (ha!) Beckett that he’s what she wants.  There had been a suspicious, if almost infinitesimal, pause on the once-over, just below belt level.  He won’t be dismissed like a naughty, or tedious, child.  He’ll show her that he’s at least as good a detective as she is – how hard can that be?  She may be stunning but come on, she’s only a cop.  She can’t possibly compete with his education, experience or wealth.  He’ll show her.  And when she’s suitably impressed, she’ll be ready for the next stage.  She’ll be desperate for the next stage.  He’s quite sure he’ll have what he wants, one way or another.  It won’t take much effort.  It never does.  He doesn’t even need to start now.  He can afford to wait.  Let her stew, and wonder.  And when he’s satisfied, he’ll walk away.  And it will serve her right to find out what she’s missing and be left. Nobody turns him down like that.  No-one. 

* * *

 

It quickly becomes apparent that he’s an even bigger nuisance than she’d first thought.  She can’t leave him unwatched for a moment.  It’s like babysitting a giant, spoilt small child, with much the same attention span and definitely the same demands for her attention.  He makes nice with the ME; who, when Beckett hisses at her, gives her a _what-are-you-on-this-guy’s-hot_ look and is only grudgingly detached from her flirtation with the oversize toddler to give Beckett the run-down.  Fortunately the boys are as unimpressed as Beckett.  A day spent in his company gives her a bad headache and an almost overwhelming desire to hit him.  Or shoot him.

But under it all she can feel the current tugging at her.  Because he may be an arrogant son-of-a-bitch, but he’s sexy in the bad-boy way that’s always turned her on.  She can tell an alpha male a mile off.  Like calls to like, and she knows what she likes.  Someone strong enough to take charge, to let her give up control and let someone else lead.  There aren’t many of them around, and she hasn’t met one in years.  And now she has, and she tells herself she’d rather scrape dirt off her shoe than have to be in his company for one more instant.


	2. Sweet dreams are made of these

She dreams, always, in sensations and sounds, never in clear vision.  Vivid dreams, making up for her confined life: work the mainstay of her existence, occasional nights out with the team, occasional girls’ nights with the ME who is her only female friend.  Truthfully, her only friend.  She doesn’t confide in her team, nor they in her.  Lanie thinks she should date, but frankly she can’t be bothered.  She won’t be picking up the sort of men she might actually want to meet in cop bars or nightclubs, and she’s sick of being hit on by drunken office drones who’re turned on by the shield and the gun, but who think she’s some sort of stripper who isn’t a real cop.  And if you want to keep respect, you don’t date another cop.  She’d dated a Fed once, and it had been good, for a while, till she chose her career over his, and it ended in vicious words and hard feelings.

And so she dreams of touch and taste and words and noises, and pretends she’s satisfied with that and her own imagination and abilities.  At twenty-nine, she never admits to herself that she misses hard reality, size and heat and muscle; physical contact and weight pressing her down, filling her up.  She tells herself that the dreams, and her imagination, are enough.

She’s asleep almost as soon as her head plumps on to the pillow, splayed out across the full width of the king-size bed.  She’s a restless sleeper, the comforter always tangled in the morning; the sheet rumpled and half on the floor.  Tonight, her dreams are waiting for her: dark and edgy and hot. 

She’s stretched out, naked, feeling intent eyes on her, admiring the taut lines of her body as she flexes.  There’s damp at the juncture of her thighs, the slight sheen of sweat at her collarbone, her nipples hard and her breasts aching.  She’s open, wet and waiting for his touch.  She’s never disappointed, in these dreams.  Her unseen lover traces down, teasing, winding her tight till she’s twisting frantically under his hands and pleading for more, harder, _now_.  But this dream isn’t done yet.  This dream-lover doesn’t let her have what she wants, teases her more with hands and then with mouth, feasting on her until she’s reduced to formless noises and whimpering; he’s holding her apart and wholly in control of her body and reactions, finally sliding into her.  She’s right on the edge of disintegration when the sounds and sensations dissolve into visions and as she falls into shuddering orgasm the man between her legs is Castle.

She wakes shaking, sweat-soaked and angry. As if it weren’t enough that the man himself was a major disappointment, he has to spoil her dreams too.  And it had been one of the best, right up till the last moment.  She thumps her pillow back into shape, straightens up the bed and curls back down, disciplining her mind to sleep, hoping, for once, that there will be no more dreams.

In the morning she’s unrefreshed and unsatisfied, indulges in the hottest shower she can stand and satisfies her need for sensual pleasure in washing her hair, massaging her scalp; stroking on her body wash and then her favourite moisturiser.  It helps, for a while.

* * *

 

By the end of the case she hates him.  Her dreams aren’t her own any more: each one showing her Castle’s face, just as she falls full force into pleasure.  In her dreams, he makes every one of her darker fantasies come alive: things she’d learned about back when she was in Vice, letting someone else have control in ways she’d never trusted anyone to try.  Nothing too outré, though.  Pain is not her kink, and she has no desire to be in that sort of a game.  Giving up control, now… that’s a different matter.

But not with him.  He’s no less annoying, irritating, still making his practiced moves and still evidently thinking that she’ll fall into his grasp without his making any effort at all.  She doesn’t think anybody’s ever said _No_ to him before.  The more coldly she treats him, the more she cuts him off at the knees, the more obvious she makes it that she doesn’t want him there, the more she sees, with a kind of dark, hot hateful delight flaring deep in her mind, that he’s beginning to try harder. 

Castle is filled with a toxic mix of inspiration, irritation, and near-constant arousal.  He hadn’t taken long to realise that whatever Detective Beckett was, _only a cop_ didn’t cut it.  He’s scrambling to keep up with her steel-trap mind; she’s in top physical condition – she has to be, he doesn’t know how she trains but he hadn’t thought it possible to run, let alone run that fast, in high-heeled shoes – and she walks in those same heels like it’s the prelude to sex: foreplay oozing from four inch _fuck-me_ heels. 

And she makes it clear that she thinks he’s lower than sludge in the sewers. 

No-one’s ever treated him like this: like he’s an unwanted waste of space.  He’s a celebrity: Most Eligible Bachelor, the gossip columns’ darling.  Everyone loves him; everyone gives him what he wants.  The only person who can check him is his daughter, because he has to be the best father he can be, for her.  He loves her unconditionally, with all of his heart and soul, and she stops him from acting on every impulse, because he’d never, ever, do anything that would damage her.

Redeeming love for his daughter aside, he can’t bear the fact that this Detective isn’t succumbing to his charms.  In a dark corner of his mind, he plans how to make her give him what he wants, willingly.  And in between, he writes his newest character the way he wants the Detective to be: feisty, hot, intelligent – but then there’s the parts that will never make the published book, at least for a mass market.  The parts where she’s wet, wanton, willing: receptive to anything his male lead wants her to do.  Badass, kick-ass, hard-ass and in control out of bed, but open and needy and definitely not in control in it.  As a consequence, he spends the time around the real Detective in a state of considerable discomfort, not in the slightest eased by the mixture of what he’s seeing and what he’s writing.  He wants to take her into one of the interrogation rooms and _interrogate_ her infinitely desirable body: push her up against a wall and kiss her, press into her, till she opens to him.  In truth, he simply wants to take her.  But force is not his kink.  At least, not without full agreement.  He’s not that man.  He won’t ever be that man.

Without realising it, he’s beginning to try harder.  He’s thinking, not content to look slow in front of her.  He wants to out-think her, and he’s finding that it takes considerable effort, which does not always pay off.  She’s a _lot_ more intelligent than he’d thought was possible.  So he can’t resist showing off what he already knows about her, when they’re sorting through his fan mail, which has completely failed to impress upon her what a desirable partner he is: how popular, how many women would kill to be alone in a small room with him.  None of that makes the slightest dent in her icy dislike.  And when he pins her with a look and tells her all his conclusions about her history, trying to prove how clever he is, make her at least respect his intelligence, his ability to deduce her story, she looks at him with renewed contempt and simply says _Don’t think you know me_.  Under it, though, he’s caught something.  He’ll examine it later, but he thinks it might have been pain.  It piques his interest, and feeds his obsession. 

He’s started to go to the gym more.  He’s always gone regularly: to stay in shape, keep up appearances for his own satisfaction – he’s much fitter than he looks - but now he’s intent on proving that he can keep up with her, that he’s carrying enough muscle to hold his own in a fight.  To hold her.  From stray comments her team have made – not that there are many: they don’t regard him with the same unconcealed abhorrence as Detective _I-hate-you-Mr-Castle_ Beckett, but they certainly don’t pay him any respect – he’s learned that she spars, regularly, and she’s tough.  Still, he’s got to have five, maybe six inches in height on her, deceptive as those heels are, and muscled up he must be close to twice her weight.  She’s very slim.

He’s practising at the range, in case he needs to shoot.  He won’t tell her that he doesn’t carry: no permit to hold a concealed weapon tucked in his well-stuffed wallet, but if he needs it, the ability is there.  The ridiculous fantasy that he might need to save her life is dismissed after a brief examination, but the idea that doing so would make her want him sticks around.

By the end of the case, he’s more determined to have her than ever.  When the killer’s taken down for processing, and he can see the end of his opportunity to show her what she should want approaching, he asks her out for dinner, lightly, pretending the answer doesn’t really matter.  She turns him down flat, more of that infuriating cold contempt lacing her words.

“So I could be one of your conquests?”  There’s a very clear implication of _I don’t think so_.  He pulls his game on.

“Or I could be one of yours.”  But he wouldn’t be.  He’ll conquer her.  That’s how his games go.  _Vidi, vici, veni._   Or more colloquially: _I saw, I conquered, I came._   Though he’s always made sure that his partner of the time did too: his pride demands that he’s the best lover possible, leaving them exhausted, yet still desperate for more.  It’s just another way of being in full control, and it keeps his reputation intact.  But she’s _still_ refusing him.

“Too bad,” he says.  “It would have been great.”  It would have been.  She’s _fascinating_.  When she turns back towards him and smiles slowly and seductively, sin and knowingness flaring darkly, hotly in her eyes, he thinks he’s got her.  She leans in close enough to kiss, and whispers in his ear.

“You have _no_ idea.”  Then suddenly she’s three strides away again and he’s left painfully, shockingly aroused simply by the sex-soaked tone of her voice, the scent of her hair and body; watching her leave with a sway of her hips that promises hot, moist delights in dark, subtle ways.  Her walk is wicked: tells him that this is no vanilla innocent.  But she’s gone, and the case is over, and he has been entirely unable to convince her to be with him.  _No-one_ does this to him.  No-one leaves him hot, hard and unsatisfied. 

And so his obsession takes another ratchet upward, and he begins to write as soon as he gets home.

Around half of what he’s written is suitable for his publishers; the other half will stay firmly in the private areas of his laptop.  _His_ Detective, still un-named, has been provoking his male lead (ah.  He has a name, suddenly.  Rook.  He ignores that extremely unsubtle link, the Freudian slip, looks up and spots the bottle that started this.  Jameson.  Jameson Rook, journalist.  Yes.) all evening, leading him on, dancing on the edges of danger – and making it very clear that she wants him. 

And so she gets what she wants, and more.  Rook’s a big man, a powerful man, and the Detective he’s creating for Rook, the one that only exists in his head, is no physical match for him when it gets up close and personal.  He lets Rook loose, pulling the Detective in hard, ravaging her mouth, hands gripping her, making sure she can’t step back; but this Detective wants it as much as Rook does, and gives back with interest.  Rook’s undone her formal button-down – he can see it in front of him, just like the one spiky, angry Detective Beckett was wearing – spreading it open and palming her breasts in their silk-and-lace cocoon, using the fabric and the force to heat her up and make her moan, biting at her neck and then kissing his way downward till he sucks and licks and nips over her breasts and starts to make her whimper for more, strips her hard and fast and hot till she’s naked and wet and open for Rook, writhing and desperate, and only then does Rook take her to the bedroom, push her down and use his strength to hold her still while she fights to bring him closer, scratches and claws and screams.  But Rook’s in control, and this Detective is begging him to be inside her, over her, long before Rook’s ready to allow her that. He hears how she’ll plead, order, beg and moan, sees and feels Rook taking her with hands and mouth and finally, when all she can do is make formless noises and she’s stretched open and wet and ready, thrusting into her beneath him till both of them come hard.

And with every word he writes he sees Detective Beckett in his bed, at his sexual mercy, desperate to have him, all that icy control and contempt shattered under his hands and mouth and body.  By the time he’s released his own tension, her face at the forefront of his mind with every stroke, he’s decided that he’s not letting her escape him.  He’s going to possess her, and she’s going to want him to.  He no longer cares that he’s obsessed.  All that writing it out has done is fed the beast, and now he’s going to find a way to convince her to be his.  Nobody refuses him.  Nobody.  He stops writing, and starts to think.

Charming moves, that would work on any, every, other woman, have failed.  Asking her on a date – a _date!_   Half of New York would kill for him to ask them to join him for a drink, never mind on a _date_ , and _she_ turned him down flat – has failed.  Showing off how much he’s guessed about her already, how clever he is – has failed.  But.  There was that submerged hint of pain, and he abruptly remembers that the first thing he thought of when he saw her, after the immediate surge of sexual attraction, was that she was interesting.  Because he’d been bored for months, and now he may be completely frustrated, angry, and obsessed, but the one thing he can’t say he is – is bored.  And it’s not just Detective Beckett’s body, it’s her mind.  Specifically, it’s her mind at work.  Suddenly he knows what he’s going to do, but not at three a.m.

He opens the publishable document again, writes all night, again, only stops to make his daughter breakfast and see her off to school.  And once it’s normal, civilised office hours, he flips open his phone and dials Bob, again.

“Bob, hey.  It’s Rick.  I need your help.”  Bob makes warm noises of encouragement that, politician-like, commit him to nothing.  Still, Castle knows what Bob likes.  His books, and good PR for the city.  “I’ve found my new character, Bob, but I need to do some research.  It’s going to be an NYPD Homicide Detective.  Good PR for them, and for the city, but I need more detail than I can get in the library and on the net.  Can you and the Commissioner get me into the Twelfth Precinct?  You know that they took that case where someone was killing based on my books?  It was really impressive how they worked.  I’d like to follow that lead Detective around for a while.” He’s perfectly smooth, his usual self, relaxed and jovial and chummy: all boys together with the Mayor.  He’d known, back when, that being friends with the Mayor and the Commissioner would one day pay off, and playing poker with them once a month (and never winning as much as he could have done) certainly has. 

“Okay.”  Bob sounds as if he thinks Castle may have an ulterior motive.  “She’s pretty impressive, that Detective Beckett, isn’t she?  A real hot-shot.”  He’s teasing him, but that’s fine. As long as Bob thinks it’s just another mild flirtation.  Which is all it will be.  Flirt, bed her, walk away, free of this scratching obsessive irritation; write the books and be a success again, in his own estimation and everyone else’s.

He thinks for a second. A bit of local support wouldn’t hurt either.

“Bob, what’s the name of the Precinct Captain again?”

“Montgomery.  Roy Montgomery.”

“Yeah.  D’you think he might like to join the poker game?  He seemed like a good guy.”  He’d liked the look of Roy Montgomery.  He’d been interesting, too.   A supporting character starts to insinuate itself into the plan.  In fact, several.  Detective Beckett’s team – three of them?  That’s an unusual number.  Irish Ryan and that Latino – he scrabbles for the name, ah yes, Esposito – were clearly partners, but he didn’t see that Detective Beckett was actually paired with anyone.  She was very much in charge: there was that slight reserve around her.  So there’s a space.  A Rick Castle-sized space.  And if he fills that space in the precinct, for research, then he’s got a chance to fill that other space.  She’ll see, and more importantly, feel, him fill that space.  He’ll get what he wants. He always does.

“Sure,” says Bob.  “He’s a good player.”  And Castle is sure that Bob thinks it’s all his own idea when he goes on to say, “Why don’t we include him in tonight’s game?” and sounds pleased and even a little surprised when Castle agrees.  Now Castle can’t wait to cut the call and get back to his characters. 

Irish Ryan, clearly the junior partner: a bit softer, dressed like he still answers to his mom each morning.  Still, there must be a bit more to him than that.  Castle wonders what his back story is.  Esposito, the Latino.  He’s tough, and, Castle suspects, more than a little protective of his lead Detective.  There’s a history there, between Detectives Beckett and Esposito, but he doesn’t think it has anything to do with sex.  The interactions are all wrong for that.  Good.  He doesn’t want to have to fight off anyone else.  He stops for a moment.  Why’s he so sure that Detective _I-don’t-care-about-you_ Beckett is single?  He reviews their meetings.  There was that flare of instantly suppressed arousal in her eyes when she hauled him in for questioning.  Her extreme care never to touch him.  To avoid any possibility that he might accidentally – or not – touch her.  The edgy, angry irritation, under the cool, calm exterior – ah, yes, that.  Born out of not acknowledging the tension between them.  That tension’s not something that arises if you’re getting it elsewhere.  That’s something that only burns if you’re not getting it at all.  Another route into Detective Beckett.  He carefully doesn’t think that she’s not the only one who’s edgy, irritated, and celibate.


	3. You can't always get what you want

Castle hosts the poker game with the same combination of boyish charm, boys-night-in, food and liquor as always.  The more he sees of Roy Montgomery, the better he likes the look of him.  He thinks, if he plays his hand right, that Montgomery will be his biggest asset.  If he gets it wrong, Montgomery will turn into the biggest hard-ass that Castle’s ever met, and unlike most of the people he, Castle, meets, Montgomery needs and wants absolutely nothing from him.  So it’s just as well that he seems to like Castle.  A few hands, and drinks, down, it’s time to put his plan into action.

“Roy, I was really impressed by the way your team handled that case based round my books.”  His sincerity is palpable – especially since he doesn’t have to fake it this time.  He really had been impressed.  “In fact, it gave me an idea for a new book, but I really need to see how you operate to be able to do it justice.  I’ve always done my research by being on the spot, and” – he puts on his best open and honest expression, with a hint of _you’re the only one who can make this happen_ – “if you could see your way to letting me follow Detective Beckett and her team around that would be really helpful.”

The Commissioner bounds in supportively, without even having been primed.  “Roy, I think this is an excellent plan.  The publicity would be good for all of us, and the NYPD.  I’m sure Rick won’t write anything that would denigrate the good name of the police.”  Castle shakes his head firmly.  He has no intention of doing that.  Bob adds his agreement.

Montgomery looks very hard at Castle when the other two aren’t paying attention.  Castle doesn’t turn a hair.  He’s sure that Montgomery is a top-class cop, but he’s been acting all his adult life, being whoever he needs to be to get what he wants.  It’s never failed him yet, and when Montgomery nods slightly he knows it hasn’t failed now.

“Okay,” Montgomery drawls.  “We’ll give it a go.  Rick, you’ll need to sign a whole bunch of waivers and releases.  First off, though, you’d better drop by the precinct around the end of shift tomorrow – that’ll be about six – and once you get there I’ll advise Detective Beckett of the arrangement.  Once that’s done, we’ll get the lawyer in.”

“Sounds good.  I’ll be there.”

“Mmm.  One more thing, though.”  Montgomery fixes Castle with a gimlet glare.  “That’s my best team.  If their solve rate falls, and it’s on you, then you’ll be gone.  Good PR or not.  I can’t afford  for the hit rate to drop.”

“I won’t mess them up.  I only want to shadow them, not get involved.”  Well, it’s mostly true.  He doesn’t want to be involved with the homicides, necessarily.  That’s not his primary goal.  He wants to be _involved_ with Detective Beckett.  And now he’s got his route  in.  _Game on, Detective.  Let’s see how long you can hold out when I’m with you every day.  You’ll be wanting me before you know it._

Fuelled by the success of the first phase of his plan, and not a small amount of whiskey, Castle returns to his novel once the poker game disbands, setting up his subsidiary characters and scrawling in their back stories.  No names, as yet.  Names will come to him, at the right time.  When he’s finished that, as far as inspiration will take him, he sits back and congratulates himself on his cleverness.  Which leads him back to the vision of Detective Beckett, walking away from him with a sashay that screamed sex with every step; which naturally leads him to the private chapters on his laptop, pretending that he’s writing about the characters.

He starts with what she’ll wear.  Dress pants and button-downs, sure, but under that silk, and lace, the same deep emerald green as her eyes.  It’ll be sensual, both to sight and touch, sliding over cream skin with a susurrating whisper, soft as sin and twice as enticing.  And only Rook will know she wears it, because she’ll only wear it for him.  He’ll buy it for her, and insist, and then each time he looks at her she’ll know he’s imagining her clad in only that, undressing her with his eyes in the way he will later undress her with his hands, when they’re in one or other apartment, leaving her spread out across the bed in heels and lingerie, portrait of a wanton.  She’ll do it for him, display herself and watch him watching her, heat sparking across the space between them.  By the time Rook moves, she’ll not be able to resist him, left hot and damp by only the look in his eyes.

He leaves it there, suddenly tired; prepares for bed, his story still at the forefront of his mind, and as he slides between his sheets all he sees in his mind, again, is the vision of Detective Beckett stretched out and waiting for him, here: not her sarcastic, cold, contemptuous self, but converted in his imagination into his toy Detective, his character, open, pliant and willing.  His last thought before he falls into dreams is that tomorrow Detective Beckett is going to find that she made a big mistake turning him down.  The concept that he’s acting like a spoilt child, only wanting what he can’t have, demanding attention, doesn’t even make it to his hindbrain.  His dreams are hot and edgy, and in every one of them Detective Beckett features, naked, hot and responsive.  When he wakes, he’s uncomfortable and all too aroused, and it takes him much longer than he’d like, than he expects, to calm himself.

* * *

 

Beckett spends the day on the post-case paperwork, immeasurably relieved to be shot of that irritating writer and his distilled-sex voice.  Maybe now her dreams will return to faceless sensation, she’ll be rid of this creeping desire, the dark knowledge that if she let him, he could give her what she’s seeking.  If only he’d been worth the effort.  If only he’d wanted her, rather than just another piece of meat, not worth trying for, just another warm body so he could scratch a momentary itch.  If only, then she might well have succumbed.  But she won’t be a notch on anyone’s bedpost; she’s got more self-respect than that.

When Montgomery summons her in at the end of the day, she assumes it’s some administrative matter to be dealt with.  It takes her a few minutes to comprehend what she’s hearing, and when she does she’s incandescently angry.  To be shadowed by _any_ civilian would be bad enough.  To find that she’s been sucker-punched by the arrogant, spoilt, _I’m-God’s-gift-to-women_ Richard Castle, who’s forced his way into the precinct under the guise of _research_ – yeah, sure.  She knows what he wants to _research_.  For one night only – and is going to be following her around: everywhere she goes, every case that drops, every witness, every move, every theory, every single minute he wants to be there, she has to let him.  _Fuck._   It’s all she can think.  She doesn’t want to be anyone’s _inspiration_.

From the bad-boy smirk on his face, as he leans against the doorframe, making sure he’s displayed to best advantage, she’s sure every iota of her horror at the prospect is plain on her face.  And that _bastard_ is enjoying every piece of her discomfiture.  Not only that, but he’s looking her up and down as if he can see straight through to her underwear.  It’s infuriating all over again, made worse because the gaze is reverberating down her nerves and building heat deep within her body.  She manages not to curse out loud, to pull on her calm professionalism, while Montgomery explains that as soon as Mr Castle has signed the waivers tomorrow he will begin.  She leaves the instant she can, automatic formal farewell of _Goodnight, sir_ to Montgomery, ignoring that Nemesis is still in Montgomery’s office, ignoring further that he follows her to the elevator.

“You shouldn’t have turned me down, Detective.  Now I’ll be around you all the time, till I’ve taken what I want.”  He looks at her face, almost bland and unrevealing, but he can see the horrified fury in the depths of her eyes.   He knows what she’s thinking.  He smiles happily at her, deliberately charmingly – he already knows how that riles her.  “I need to know all about how you work: how you solve cases, how you deal with the paperwork, how warrants and arrests and interrogations are done, how you interact with the rest of the team.”  The smile shifts from happy into predatory.  “Of course, I’ll be part of that team now.  We’ll see how we interact, too.”

She steps as far away as possible.  He’s too smug and too big and too close and too attractive.  She doesn’t even like him: he’s arrogant and selfish and he’s forced his way into the precinct and _her_ team under some subterfuge of _research_ and _observation_ and why can’t he take a hint and leave her alone?  He doesn’t move, just leans on the wall of the elevator and examines her without even pretending that he isn’t stripping off her outer layers and imagining her in her underwear.  She hates that look, that velvet voice; and hates more that it’s having just the effect he wants: sliding down her skin and into her nerves, slithering seduction slipping deep into her.  She’s always liked the bad boys, the edge of danger, and it’s certainly standing right there in front of her.  But she tells herself she won’t succumb to a spoilt playboy with an itch.  No matter how well he pushes her buttons and pulls all her triggers. 

Castle’s wholly delighted with how the day has gone.  All Detective Beckett’s cool, calm icy control isn’t entirely hiding that he’s got under her skin, though it’s a pretty impressive façade.  He wonders if it’s linked to that flash of pain he’d caught the other day; there’d been something there that just for an instant had stopped him cold.  Maybe this Detective has a more interesting story than the one he’d told her – but he’d got enough of that right to rock her back on her _come-and-take-me_ heels; he’d seen that.  He’s pulled out all her secrets and now he’ll own her body and her mind, and she’ll let him; want him to.  She has to want it, too.  He tells himself he knows all he needs to know about her for his new character, and very specifically does not think that he’s never felt this driving need to possess his inspirations before.  Bed them, sure, but not with this same edge of obsession.  Then again, his muses have been only too happy to co-operate, before.  He’s sure he wouldn’t feel like this if she’d just behave like all the others, play along in the usual mutually enjoyable fashion.  What’s her problem?  He’s _Rick Castle_ , playboy millionaire and modern Casanova, good times guaranteed.  No-one turns him down.  No-one.

* * *

 

He’s content, at home, to play games with his daughter, lose – he never lets her win, now, unlike when she was younger, because she’s bright enough to succeed herself – at cards, have a pleasant family dinner.  Even his mother’s mildly malicious sniping, pointing out the less good parts of his reviews, can’t upset his equilibrium, especially as she’s had to get to the Smalltown Times to find a bad one.  He’s got the first stage of what he wanted, and the extremely frustrating Detective Beckett is squarely in his sights.  He goes back to his story; writing continuously, consistently, fleshing out the bones.  It’s good, he can feel it: new, _interesting_ , falling out of his fingertips on to the page, precision words and syntax, taking his putative readers exactly where he wants them to go, showing them the character he wants them to see.  The Detective will pull in his public in their droves.  To do it right, though, to write the book he wants, the book he needs to produce, he needs the details of a working precinct and a working Detective and her team.  He has to be there, right by her side, (he doesn’t even notice that he only thinks _her_ , not _their_ ) seeing it through her eyes, every last detail.  He’s interested, intrigued, fascinated by the way they worked to solve the crime, and nothing’s penetrated his ennui for months, so it’s not surprising that he’s so desperate to be at the Twelfth, uncover the story.  Her story. 

On that thought he veers from publishable to private, again, indulging his fantasies and making _his_ Detective into the willing participant that glacial Detective Beckett ought to be.  She’s angry with Rook; the reason doesn’t matter, but he probably made some smart comment at the wrong moment; and so she’s ignoring him, giving him the cold shoulder, telling him not to come around tonight.  Rook’s not having that, though: he knows that he can change her mind, melt the ice; this dream-Detective likes to be …persuaded... and Rook knows it, and how she likes it, all too well.  So he won’t be denied: gets into her car; ignores all protests and orders to quit; comes to her apartment and pushes in.  And once he’s through her door he catches her by the shoulders and spins her round and traps her between his muscle and the wall and takes her mouth possessively; kicks her feet apart and grinds into her. 

He knows – Rook knows: Castle doesn’t know anything yet, but he hopes – that the story Detective likes it when he’s rough, when he takes charge, and sure enough she opens up to him and winds one long leg around his waist, moaning into his mouth as he shows her just what she does to him, just what he’ll do for her.  He opens her shirt, takes a second to appreciate the fine silk over skin, dips his head and nips at the soft curves; makes her gasp and push towards him, wanting more.  He’ll – Rook.  _Rook_ will – give her more, his hands busy at the fastening of her pants, loosening them to drop them down, momentarily stepping back to allow them to fall and leave her standing in an opened shirt, not quite slipping off her shoulders, and _come-and-get-it_ underwear.

“You shouldn’t shut me out.”  Castle still has no name for this woman, but he knows how Rook will think.  It’s how he thinks.  “You know you’ll let me in.  You like me pushing in.”  He looks hungrily at her, hard against her.  The dream-Detective doesn’t answer, simply moves a little, circling against him, taking friction and her own pleasure.  “Uh-uh.  You don’t get to do that till you let me in again.  Talk to me.”  He – _Rook, dammit_ – holds her torso still against the wall, leans in and kisses her slowly, deeply, not touching anywhere else.  She digs firm fingers into his back, trying to pull him tight in, but he’s not having that, won’t be her toy.  That’s not how they roll.  When he’s kissed her for a while, moving off her lips to round her neck, angling her just the way he wants to find the small nerves that make her wriggle and gasp some more, he brings his hands down across her breasts and strokes, moulding and palming and swiping over the erect nipples: leaves that before she’s had enough and comes back up to press into her.  “What do you want,” – he really needs a name, but now he doesn’t even try to pretend this isn’t wish-fulfillment fantasy – “Beckett?  This?”  And he brings a hand down to cup her and slide his thumb over her till she’s writhing and he feels the silk turn damp under his wicked fingers.

“Yes.  Touch me, dammit.”

“Stop shutting me out when you’re mad.  Shout, or yell, or anything; but not silence.”  He strokes again, pulling the delicate fabric over her with each movement, enough to excite but not to satisfy.  “Talk to me.  Why’d you get mad?”

“You’re an arrogant asshole.”

“But you love me for it.”  She shakes her head, not willing to give Rook any concession, but her body betrays what she really feels.  He slips fingers under the silk, teasing his Detective, winding her tighter, nipping her shoulder to remind her that he’s still a little mad himself at being ignored.  She pulls him closer and takes his mouth, biting his lip, invading as his fingers invade her body and match the duel of their tongues.  He slides them in and out, stoking her to heat and movement, and finally he relents and slides across her with his thumb in the same rhythm as his thrusting fingers and she starts to clench around him and press down so he goes deeper and then she gasps Rook’s name and comes.

Castle stops writing.  He’s so aroused by his imaginings that he’s incapable of typing any further.  The thought of controlled Detective Beckett against his door, being melted from the frozen façade that she’s been presenting non-stop since day one, has left him with only one remedy, and he takes it.  It doesn’t stop him dreaming: more of the intense, erotic images that leave him unfulfilled and unsatisfied.  His morning shower has to be as cold as he can bear; but the knowledge that he’ll be following Detective Beckett around from now on until _he_ chooses rebuilds his self-control.

He’ll win her.  He’ll have her.  He’s Rick Castle, and all _his_ dreams come true.  He always, always gets what he wants.


	4. Dream a little dream of me

The precinct lawyer has a stack of waivers a mile high, and it’s clear that Detective Beckett is hoping that they’ll put him off.  _Not likely, Detective. No way_.  It boils down to one point: no matter what happens to him he can’t sue the precinct, or the city, or anyone associated with the NYPD in any way.  Even his estate, on behalf of his cold dead corpse, won’t be able to sue anyone for anything.  He doesn’t care.  It’s something new, and interesting, and he’s definitely not bored any more at all.  Well, he won’t be when he’s finished with this pile of papers and the lawyer, which are not interesting in the slightest.

Even Detective Beckett muttering, not at all sotto voce, from the corner _can’t I just shoot him now_ doesn’t upset him in any way.  He’s got here, to the precinct, to her.  He can’t wait for a case.  It dawns on him that as much as he wants Detective Beckett in his bed, he wants to see her mind working, how she does her job.  When she’d been investigating she’d been so focused, so intent: there hadn’t been anything else except finding the right answer.  Ah-ha.  That’s what matters to her.  A little piece of her personality falls into place.  No wonder she’d been so annoyed with him, in questioning.  Mmm.  Well.  He reckons he can show her that he can help her do the job.  And it will most certainly be interesting.  The previous case had been interesting.  He’d like to do another one.  And maybe have a little fun – or a lot of fun, all of it involving Detective Beckett - along the way. Perhaps he can lull her into a sense of security, if he can make her think that he’s a little goofy, a lot charming, a bit useful.  Of course, there will be other moments.  Mix it up a bit, so she’s on her toes.  He can act.  He’s been acting almost all his life.  ( _Do this, Ricky.  We need a child on stage._ )  So far, it’s got him everything he’s ever wanted.

Beckett is hoping, without any great expectations, that the pile of waivers and all the matters that (with a little bit of luck) might damage that too-handsome face or body will put Castle off.  Unfortunately, it seems that it’s only making him more enthusiastic.  If he wasn’t such an arrogant ass it would almost be… cute.  What?  Cute?  No.  No way.  She glares and asks if she can shoot him now.  It’ll save her so much trouble.  And if he were dead he wouldn’t be invading her dreams any more.  She wouldn’t be wondering now if he could be what she’s been looking for.  He isn’t.  He can’t be.  He’s going to be a pain in the ass, and she already hates him, for not being what, or who, she wanted him to be.  But while he’s acting – again – like an overgrown child being given a treat, as if catching killers was a trip to the zoo; at least he’s not running that hungry, assessing, undressing gaze over her.  Which she tells herself is a considerable relief, and knows it for a lie as soon as she does. 

A body drops almost straight away.  Beckett discovers a whole new level of irritation equally fast.  He touches things.  Everything except her.  Though she thinks – she’s sure, from the way he watches her - he’d do that too, if she let her control slip and gave him the slightest hint of encouragement.  He fiddles with her car radio, till she threatens to kill him if he changes the channel again.  He wants to put on the lights and siren, and she says she’ll arrest him if he abuses cop privileges.  And he talks.  And talks.  And talks, all delivered in a tone that she’s certain has opened women up in every possible wicked way.  She likes quiet, peace to think, to concentrate: to let the evidence settle in her mind, then twist and reform, till she sees the answer.  It’s been a long time since she liked noise, and chat, and double-edged, innuendo laden comments, and flirtation.  About ten years, in fact, since she grew up in a hurry, and stopped being the wild child on campus.  Stopped being on that campus at all.

When they’re out the car, he still talks.  But now he’s questioning her about her personal life.  She doesn’t talk about that.  She won’t tell him about her past: he’ll definitely only take that as encouragement, something of which he is certainly not in need.  He’s guessed far too much already.  He’s flirting again, so she freezes up, again, until he reverts to talking about the murder.  And thus it stays, throughout the case.  Until the end.

She’s in a basement laundry room, trying to talk down a self-harming, semi-suicidal nanny who’s killed her lover.  She’d told Castle to stay out: his particular brand of irritation will only distract her, introduce a random variable, and likely stress the nanny even further towards something irrevocable; and this takedown will be hard enough when Beckett’s fully focused.  The nanny is all too likely to use the butcher knife in her hand either to try to kill herself or to take a slice out of Beckett, and while she’s trained in self-defence, bare hands against a large knife is not a good equation.  She can’t afford to be scared, to visualise the possible, horrible outcomes.  There’s only the moment and the soft voice and the chance to save this girl before her repetitive, horrible, bloody self-harming becomes fatal.

She knows instantly when Castle decides to ignore her and enter.  Fortunately the girl doesn’t notice, and Beckett manages to finish bringing her down and take her in.  Once the nanny’s out the way, taken down for processing, matters go to hell in a handcart as soon as she gets into the precinct car park.  All the slight – very slight - softening in her views of him has been seared into ash by his arrogant, blind stupidity.

“What the hell did you think you were doing, ignoring my order to stay outside?”

“I…”

“You what?  You wanted to see a perp kill themselves?  Or did you want to see her stab me?”  She’s furious, bitter and vicious; each word flung at him; javelins piercing his pride.  “Have I hurt your overweening ego so much that you’d go that far?” 

 _Overweening_?  Where does a cop get a word like that?  Then what she’s just said meets his brain. 

“No!  I wanted to help.”

“Help?  You think you know better than me what will help?  Tell me when you became a cop, _Mr_ Castle?  You just couldn’t bear not irritating me, could you?  Couldn’t stand not being the centre of attention.  Well, I hope you think it was worth it.  Walking in like that could have made that girl kill herself or attack me.  Or didn’t you know that, _Mr_ Castle?  Or maybe you did know that, and didn’t care.”

She turns and walks away, leaving him staring at her back, feeling smaller than he ever has in his adult life.  He’s fucked this up big time, that’s for sure.  He _had_ wanted to help.  He’d also wanted to show her he could help.  ( _Keep out the way, Ricky.  You’re not helping_.)  Show off.  He wants her screaming, but not with pain.  He takes a few quick strides, trying to catch up.  He knows what he has to do.

“Beckett, wait!”  She doesn’t break stride.  He moves faster, gaining on her before she can reach her car and leave.  Somehow he knows that if she drives off now he’ll never get a chance to make it better.  Not that it looks like he’s going to have much of a chance now.  He catches up and grabs her shoulder. 

“Wait.  I want to” –

“To what, _Mr_ Castle?  Discuss all the ways that you screwed up?  Not interested.”  She shakes his hand off.  She’s so angry with him that his touch, which she normally avoids as if it burned, hasn’t had the slightest effect on her.

“Apologise.  I’m sorry.”  He hasn’t needed to apologise to anyone in years.  Everyone always forgives him.  Until now, and furious, contemptuous Detective Beckett, showing him all too clearly that he’s failed.  He hates the feeling of failure apologising brings, and hates more that he’s been stupid enough to make it necessary.

She looks up at him with sincere loathing and utter disbelief.  He can see that she thinks he’s lying.  He’s not.  He’s screwed up, and he will damn well show her he can be – _is_ \- man enough to fix it.  Try to fix it.  She turns sharply away from him and takes fast steps the remainder of the distance to her car, unlocking it remotely as her heels rap on the concrete.  He follows.  He’s not going to let her walk away, thinking _that_ about him.  He’s not that man. 

He catches her arm and forcibly stops her opening the car’s door, flipping her round and holding her against the metal, in front of him.  “I said _, I’m sorry._ Aren’t you even going to acknowledge it?”

“Not interested.”  Her entire tone says he’s not worth listening to, not even worth the effort of annoyance.  She doesn’t even bother herself to look at him.  She’s dismissing him, dismissing his apology, not even getting angry.  He’s never been treated with this cold, disdainful indifference in his life.

“Will you just listen to me for a minute?”  He’s angry, now, not least spurred by guilt and self-inflicted humiliation, and he’s going to make her pay attention.  If he has to abase himself, then the least she can do is look at him while he does it.  He ignores the small insinuating voice in his head that asks him why he’s bothering?  He could just leave and turn up tomorrow, forget this ever happened, squash down the worm of his fault; follow her around just like he has done.  Except it wouldn’t be the same.  He’s not so drowned in his own PR that he can’t see that if he doesn’t try, very, very sincerely, to fix this, then she’ll never respect him for an instant.  And he badly wants her to respect him.  Along with… other feelings.  Even now, he knows that if she doesn’t begin to respect him he’ll never get anywhere.  And he wants to.  Oh so much.

“Why?  Don’t you like not being listened to?”  She’s jabbing at him, now, each word punching into him.  “Now you know what it feels like.  Enjoying it?  No?  Too bad.”  She wrenches her arm away and turns to take the door handle.  He whips her back round again and holds on to her shoulders so she has to face him.  When she looks up the renewed roil of fury in her face is undiluted.  She’s so angry, he finally understands, not because he put her in danger – though he did – but because he put someone else - the killer, for whom she’d exhibited considerable empathy - in danger.  Oh.  Another tile in the mosaic of her personality is fixed into place in his mind. He feels even smaller, if that were in any way possible.  Shortly he might disappear altogether.

“I’m _trying_ to say sorry.  I didn’t realise anyone could get hurt.”  He notices he’s still gripping her shoulders, and notices further that she isn’t reacting to that in the slightest.  He’d thought, from the care she’s taken never to touch him, that she would.  Not, it seems, in these circumstances.  Clearly her passion for her job easily displaces any _other_ passion she might show.  He files that for later, and drops his hands, steps a little back, poised to pounce again should she try to leave before she’s listened to his apology.  He needs her to listen.  He needs to make this right.

“Please, listen.  I’m _sorry_.  I screwed up.”  It must be the first time in years, outside his home, that he’s been this sincere about anything.  Something about the rawness in his tone finally penetrates the hard shell of indifference, and Beckett looks at him, still freezingly, icily angry.

“Yes.  You did.”  That falls to the floor and doesn’t bounce.  She’s not inclined to cut him any slack at all.  He could have got her injured, and that unhappy girl killed.  Just as she’d been starting to come round to the idea that he might not be quite so bad after all, his spoilt, stupid behaviour has reminded her of all the good reasons why she shouldn’t let him any closer than she absolutely must, because she’s been ordered to.

He looks suddenly miserable, closer to real than she’d thought he could manage.  It’s almost enough.  But she doesn’t want to make it easy for him, because if she does he’ll do something equally stupid tomorrow or the next day or next week, and it might not be okay in the end.  She waits.

“I am sorry,” he says quietly, desolately.  For the first time she sees a glimpse of the man behind the public face.

“I hear you.  Go home, Mr Castle.  And don’t ever be that stupid again.”

She’s in the car and pulling away before he understands that he’s – if not, undoubtedly not, forgiven – at least still permitted to turn up tomorrow.  It helps him recover a small part of his usual ebullience, but as he trudges homeward he’s still jabbed by the feeling of failure.  It bites hard.  He doesn’t fail at anything, now.  He’s been a success for years.  And here it’s taken ten minutes of his own stupidity and half an hour of Detective Beckett’s cold contempt for him to be reduced to the small, insecure child with no long-term friends, scratching and clawing to keep up through a succession of different schools at different stages.  ( _Don’t you know that, Mr Rodgers?)_ Always be the cool kid, the class clown, the cocky charmer, and, always hidden, always underneath, work your ass off.  That’s how you stay liked, and loved, and in control.  That’s how you don’t fail.

Maybe he should try charm a little more consistently on Detective Beckett.  Maybe she’d like him better – better?  At all - then.  Maybe.  Because he wants her.  Cold contempt or not, he wants her.  And in a small dark section of his mind, he wants her more because she won’t just roll over and let him have her.   He’ll make her change her mind.  And it’ll be all the sweeter when she does.  There might be something to this idea of working for reward after all.  For a while.

* * *

 

Beckett’s been bitterly disappointed in Castle, and it had fuelled her fury.  Intrusive – _penetrating_ flits through her mind and its appeal dismissed without a hearing – personal questions aside, he’d been becoming – not utterly useless.  But today his behaviour was not just childish, which might have been marginally excusable, though at – what? Forty? – disconcerting, but far worse, actively dangerous; and for all his supposed intelligence and insight he hadn’t realised.

Pause there.  It’s clear from the tone of his apology and his – clearly disliked – driving need to make her understand the extent of his remorse that, whatever she’d initially thought in the flashfire of fury, it hadn’t been malice.  That thought carries an unexpected wash of relief.  She’d not wanted it to be malice, she realises.  Because if it were, whatever it took she’d have had him out.  Can’t have someone around that you can’t trust at all.  Not that she trusts him.  Not one inch.  But there’s nothing, still, even after today, to say that she definitely shouldn’t trust him.  And deep in that small dark unacknowledged corner of her mind, the surreptitious slinking of desire slides out another delicate claw, spreads a little wider.

Back to the point.  Hadn’t realised.  Not malice, possibly not even stupidity.  Ignorance.  And isn’t that why he’s making a nuisance of himself following her around like this: to cure his ignorance?  Well.  He’s certainly had a large dose of harsh medicine today.  Let’s see if it makes any difference.

She drifts into thinking about the whole episode after the nanny had been taken down for processing.  It had been a little… odd.  For a start, she hadn’t expected an apology at all.  Self-justification,  oh yes.  Certainly not the desperate sincerity he’d produced.  And it had been desperate.  The way he’d gripped her arm, her shoulders – she’ll check for bruising, later.  He’d been… forceful.  Deep down, unnoticed by her conscious mind, the predator’s paw stretches out a little further at that thought, puts out another talon.  He hadn’t _liked_ having to apologise, that’s for damn sure.  But he’d done it, and kept on doing it till she listened.  He’d meant it, that’s for damn sure too.

There’d been more than just an intense dislike of apologising, though.  She’d not spared him the full venom of her views – not one ounce of it - and behind the mask she’d seen a very unexpected flash of some other emotion: not quite pain, not quite shame, not quite regret.  A mix of all of those, perhaps.  Hmm.  Maybe there’s a little more to him than spoilt, childish arrogance.  (She doesn’t think about the aura of raw sex that he exudes whenever he’s alone with her.  Not where she has to acknowledge it, anyway.  Another talon grips, unseen.)

She deals with the stress of the day in her accustomed fashion: a glass of good wine; (she doesn’t drink much, usually, but when she does, it’s good quality) a deep, hot bath with soothing, scented  oils; a good book; the gentle flicker of candles with the same scent as her bath oil. Gradually, as the wine takes effect and the heat of the water permeates her body, she relaxes, as much as she ever does.  When she emerges to wrap herself in a soft, fluffy towel, she’s loose-limbed and sleepy, slipping into silky nightwear and soft cotton sheets; slithering down against the pile of pillows; dark hair and eyelashes vivid against the cream bed linens and her skin.

Her dreams await her, soft and sensual, not the edgy darkness that often comes, but smooth, confident strokes and soft touches, gently bringing her higher; careful harmony and delicate counterpoint; control without coercion.  Tonight’s dream-lover remains perfectly, thankfully, anonymous, and she wakes satisfied, sated and refreshed.


	5. A dirty down addiction

At home in the loft, Castle manages to put up a façade of normality over dinner, enough to defeat his mother’s minimal interest in his day – which for once is welcome, not the irritant it often is – although his daughter is watching him with a certain amount of concern.  He drops his first plan; to write out his feelings into the new book, and then write out the other feelings he’s imposing on Rook elsewhere, in favour of spending time with Alexis.  It always soothes him, to be with her.  She’s the one thing in his world that never, ever makes him feel small, or lesser.

A couple of hours later, the sting of remembered humiliation has diminished just far enough under Alexis’s gentle sympathy - though very fortunately she doesn’t know for what her sympathy is required - that Castle is able to write something in his normal style, rather than something that might actually reveal some real emotion.  ( _Stop crying, Ricky. Crying won’t help_.)  Well written, sardonic thrillers sell, in their millions.  He doesn’t need to incorporate his own feelings in order to be a stunning success, Number One Bestseller on every bookstand, Black Pawn’s golden boy.  Everybody loves him, everybody wants him.  Wants a piece of him.  It’s everything he’d thought he ever wanted, dreamed of having, as a small child backstage at a thousand theatres, new boy in a hundred schools.  He’d sworn to himself then, even then, that when he grew up nobody would ever be able to make him do anything he didn’t want to; nobody would ever fail to respect, or like, or love him ever again.  And he’d made good on it.

Until now.  Until today.  Until he’d been made to feel so very, very small.  None of his wealth, fame, sexy charm and, for women on whom sexy doesn’t work – very few - practised adorability had made the slightest difference to icily furious Detective Beckett, who, frankly, my dear, doesn’t give a damn.  If he hadn’t been so humiliated, if just the thought of her face as she reduced him to scrappage hadn’t flung him right back to insecure childhood; he’d have been astonished, and impressed, by that.  In fact, he realises, nobody at the Twelfth cares about who he is, or what he’s done, or what he owns or earns.  All they care about is catching criminals, and all they want to know is whether he makes their lives easier, or harder.  And as long as it’s the former, they’ll welcome him in.  They don’t need him for anything, to be anything,  and that’s very… relaxing.  He doesn’t need to be anyone except who he is.  If only he were sure who that might be, behind the mask and the fame and the lifestyle.  Being welcomed in as just an ordinary Joe would be great, except that Detective Beckett still won’t welcome him.  Yet.  But she will.  He’s determined that she will.  He’ll have her respect, and more.  She’ll _see_ him.  Oh yes.

He writes steadily, forcing himself to stay on the right side of emotion so that nobody will expect him to include it in future books.  Rook and the Detective have a publishable fight, certainly not involving life-threatening (he winces) stupidity or the sort of raking-down that had been inflicted on him.  And then he finds a separate document, neither part of the published version nor part of his fevered private imaginings, and writes out reality.  Every word hurts, but when he’s done he thinks he’s able to face the world again, without feeling quite so much of a fake.  He returns to his main manuscript, and carries on for some time, till he’s happy that tonight’s word count will at least match his own expectations of quality.  Gina’s might be another matter.

He washes, and retires to bed, but fails to sleep.  The feeling of having Detective Beckett’s arm, and shoulders, under his hands nibbles at the edges of his mind, now he’s written out and dissolved the thick coating of all those other emotions.  He contemplates Detective Beckett, in detail.  She’s totally absorbed by her job.  So much so, that when he’d jeopardised her ability to do it, she’d been so coruscatingly angry that she hadn’t reacted at all to his hands on her, despite the care she’s so obviously taken up till now to avoid any possibility of a touch.  Accidental or not.  He adds in her unexpected compassion for today’s flavour of killer, and her complete refusal to answer anything that comes anywhere close to a personal question.  He suspects if he asked her if she preferred pastrami or corned beef on her sandwich she wouldn’t answer.  The initial flash of arousal, the first time she saw him, that she chopped off short less than two minutes into questioning him.  Ah.  About the point he started to flirt.  Then he adds in everything he’d already deduced – and told her he’d deduced.  Finally he tops off with her formal behaviour – towards him, she banters with the bullpen in spades - and clothes.  Dress pants and button downs.  Very plain.  And not at all congruent with the four-inch _fuck-me_ heels and the incineratingly hot body and especially those mile long legs.  Not at all.

Detective Beckett simply does not add up.  She’s complicated.  He doesn’t like complicated.  Women aren’t normally complicated: at least the ones he’s met up till now.  They like dining out and looking good and him.  And that’s fine.  He doesn’t want complicated.  He likes simple, and easy, and being in control.  Dinner, maybe dancing, light flirting, goodbye.  Not even bed.  He grew out of that one some time ago, about the point he realised that most of the women he met thought that bed equalled relationship.  ( _Of course I love you, Rick._ )  Oh no.  Ricky Rodgers is not that stupid.  He doesn’t want relationships, doesn’t want his daughter to see that other lifestyle.  So up till now he’s not much wanted bed, either, not often, and only when he’s sure it won’t mean anything on either side.  Till sex-on-legs Detective Beckett strode into his nice, easy, perfect life and turned his head upside down.  Bed is very much on his mind, now.  Maybe even a short relationship, while he’s still interested in her?  No.  He’s never that interested.  He’ll be bored soon enough: he’s never interested in anything outside his books and his family for very long.

Detective Beckett is only interested in her job, all the time.  And that’s not just interest, that’s obsession.  He knows what that looks like.  He thinks some more, mainly about why she won’t be interested in, play nice with, him.  He could make her feel so good, so fast.  And she knows it, that’s clear, because if she wasn’t worried about how she’d react to him she wouldn’t care if she touched him or not.  That’s very nice.  He’s already got under her skin.  It’s only a matter of time before she starts to react.  Though he could help it along a little, if he wanted.  But no.  He doesn’t need to.  She’ll come around.  He can afford to wait, take it slow, wind her all the way up so that she can’t help herself.  He always gets what he wants, any way he wants it.  And he’ll make her want it, too.

He’s still irritated that she requires this much effort.  He doesn’t need to make an effort, usually, to get what he wants.  He tells himself it’s because she’s just playing hard to get, which is a game he understands perfectly and is equally perfectly prepared to play with her.  _If that’s the way you like it, Beckett, I can play that game with you._   He carefully avoids thinking that anyone else playing hard to get would be giving him the subtle signals that mean they want a come-on.  He even more carefully avoids the thought that she’s signalling exactly the opposite, most of the time.  Because every so often he thinks she’s signalling something else.  He prefers to think about her rigid control, biting tension and the occasional flash of something that isn’t anger and looks an awful lot like it might be arousal.  He wonders, intrigued, what would happen if he _accidentally_ touched her.  Maybe he should try it.  He parks that dark, arousing thought for later, and thinks some more about Detective Beckett at work.

She’s not the only one he’s been observing.  He’s been watching the interactions between Esposito and Ryan, Beckett, Montgomery, and the ME, Lanie Parrish.  It’s all a great deal more interesting than he’d thought, and more complicated.  In a good way, this time.  Beckett and Dr Parrish are close friends.  Given what he’s seen, Dr Parrish might be Beckett’s only close friend. (in considering the bullpen and homicides, he’s dropped his sarcastic emphasis on and use of Beckett’s title.)  Hmm.  Lanie Parrish.  There’s a woman who thinks Beckett should have more of a life.  More, she isn’t simply accepting Beckett’s views of him.  (just as well, really)  She might be an asset in his campaign.  Better be friends with her.  He’d seen Dr Parrish’s amused, approving expression when he’d teased Beckett.  Though he’d be very happy to explain sex to Beckett any time.  Very, very happy.  He’s quite certain that she’d enjoy his explanations.

Esposito and Ryan.  There’s a partnership that shouldn’t work anything like as well as it does.  They’ve got nothing in common, except their absolute devotion to catching the right guy.  And their protectiveness when it comes to Beckett.  He’s seen the small glimpses of worry when they leave, and she’s still staring at her murder board; he’s seen a flash of amusement when he baits her.   He’d overheard Esposito chaffing her about how good it will be to see Beckett, the ultimate control freak, try to keep him under some sort of control.  He snags for a minute on the thought that he’d like to keep her under a very specific sort of control, punctuated by ensuring that she completely loses her own control.  All night long.  He parks that thought for later, too, and the hot, edgy, private chapters of his Detective and Rook.

Back to Ryan and Esposito.  They don’t regard him with the same unalloyed disdain that Beckett uses, but they haven’t yet warmed to him.  They don’t need anything from him, so they don’t have to try to get friendly.  It’s up to him to try.  Another new, unusual pursuit, these days.  Ah well.  He’d spent his entire childhood, adolescence, and half his college years making new friends, at very regular intervals.  He certainly hasn’t forgotten how.  Nor has he forgotten how to ensure that, in making new friends, he doesn’t get too involved himself.  No point getting too involved, when you’ll only walk away, or have to leave, soon.  Close friends… well.  A nice thing to have, he supposes, but hardly a necessity.  He’s managed just fine with the friends he’s got.  But – they’re real, Esposito and Ryan.  More to them than the slick, superficial socialites, politicians and rich authors that he knows.  He realises that it would mean far more to earn their acceptance than any of his current friends.  Hmm.

And then there’s Montgomery.  Who keeps regarding him, Castle, with a very knowing expression which reminds him uncomfortably of some of his more perceptive teachers, coupled with a very heavy frosting of sardonic amusement.  Castle has the squirmingly unpleasant feeling that Montgomery knows exactly why he shoved his way into the Twelfth, and is taking considerable interest in his inability to consummate – _not_ an accidental word choice – his plans.   But then again, if he disapproved Castle is sure that Montgomery would let him know, in no uncertain terms.  He might even approve.  He’s seen the flick of concern when Montgomery leaves, and Beckett’s still working, in Montgomery’s face too.

It seems, in fact, that everyone around her is at least a little worried about Beckett.  That’s odd.  She’s brilliant at her job – so much is obvious – and stunningly sexy, so what’s not to like?  Who cares, anyway?  He wants her in his bed, and he doesn’t need to know her history for that.  It was just to show her that he’s good at detecting too.  That’s all.  Nothing more required.  That flash of pain and her complete refusal to tell him anything at all that isn’t wholly and specifically about the precinct don’t matter for that outcome.  And yet both of them eat away at his mind, when he should be writing.  Another thing that doesn’t add up.

He shakes his head irritably on his pillows.  He doesn’t need to know this about her.  He doesn’t care.  He’s not interested.  He cares about her stunning body and her incredible legs and her delicious mouth and her fast mind.  That’s all.  And he wants her in his bed, naked, open and begging, for a night, until he’s sated and satisfied; and then they’ll part, when he’s had enough.  She’ll stop invading his mind and his dreams and his writing, once he’s had her for real. It won’t take long, and then he can go back to his simple, controlled, perfectly successful life, with his new, successful character. 

He drops off to sleep, still restlessly moving, without having convinced himself of his disinterest, and falls into edgy, disturbing dreams of Detective Beckett raking him down for all his inadequacies; waking unrefreshed.  Of course, that’s when he gets a call from Beckett about another body.  He traipses off to meet her at the scene, wholly convinced that his stupidity will be dragged up every few moments for the rest of time.  His interest is definitely piqued by the corpse, though, it’s a high schooler from one of the better private schools.  And Beckett isn’t mentioning yesterday at all.  It’s almost as if it had never happened.  Strange.  His experience is that when you fuck up it’s thrown back at you for weeks.  ( _What were you thinking of, Ricky?  Can’t you get anything right, Mr Rodgers?_ )  He recovers a reasonable amount of bounce and enthusiasm, quite quickly, though he also listens extremely carefully for anything that might be an order, and considers why it might have been given before doing anything.  Of course, that doesn’t stop him very obviously looking Beckett up and down and making it clear that he’d like to know what underwear she’s wearing, because then she always reacts to him.  He’ll take almost any form of attention, as long as she doesn’t revert to the cold indifference that says he’s got nothing she cares about, nothing she cares for.

When they get the school kid who’d done it into interrogation, he turns out to be a spoilt little rich boy who seems to think that it’s okay to suggest pawing Beckett.  She’s glacially unimpressed.  Castle is infuriated, but manages to hide it.  The only person who should be suggesting that sort of a game in this room is him.  Beckett’s going to be his, soon, and some smug, smarmy little toad is not going to insult her in front of him and get away with it.  And the best form of stopping his slime will be putting him away.  So he starts drawing him in, and, amazingly, Beckett lets him do it.  He pretends to have things in common with this privileged princelet – if he’d grown up with that sort of background and money, he’d probably never have made his name; he has _nothing, nothing_ in common with this teen’s gilded life – and it works.  He feels sky-high.  It’s completely washed away the shame of the previous case, because this time he’s done something right.  More, something useful: something that actually really truly matters.  And even Beckett is regarding him with favour.  Well, without extreme dislike.  He’s made her life easier, and she’s almost being nice to him.  He thinks about asking her to come for a drink – dinner seems a stretch too far – but decides not to push his luck.  Not today.  He can be patient, if he must.  But he’s been useful, and Beckett’s being civilised, if distinctly cool, and maybe he’s getting in.   But she still makes very sure that they never, ever touch.

Three weeks of _research_ and observation has taught him quite a lot already.  Beckett cares about one thing only, and that’s justice.  She expects her team to fit a certain mould: they work hard – really hard, though not as hard as she does – they’re fit, they shoot straight, they’re clever.  Beyond that, she doesn’t care about anything.  She never seems to go home, or go out, or socialise.  She doesn’t seem to go in for personal discussions: then again, neither do the other two.  There’s so much that just never gets spoken, but somehow seems to be clearly understood between them.  So he needs to show her that he belongs on the team.  That he’s as good as they are.  That she should notice him; as part of the team; as a useful resource; and not at all at least, as a man.  He begins to plan how to achieve that, and resolutely does not think about the amount of effort he’s putting into impressing Beckett, when he never has to _try_.  And then he goes home that night, and opens the private pages of his own personal wish-fulfilment and x-rated fantasy, and begins.

Tonight his malleable, invented Detective isn’t spiky, or angry, or cold, or even irritated.  She’s tired from a long day, curled like a kitten on Rook’s lap, content to be petted and stroked and held.  Rook’s happy to oblige, for now, stealing occasional kisses and waiting for an opportune moment to take gentle advantage of this unusually yielding, pliant mood.   It doesn’t happen often, Castle decides.  His play Detective doesn’t go in for softness, at least at this point in proceedings.  Mostly, she likes it to be a little rough, a lot demanding, and a whole lot more possessive.  But today his imagination has been caught by a marginally more pleasant, less spiky Beckett, and he’s thinking about how that might be if it went a bit further towards niceness.  Rook steals another kiss, and this time pulls her in a little tighter, positions her a little more accessibly, drops her head back on the couch arm so her neck’s open to him, undoes a button on her shirt.  She stretches out a little in his grasp, relaxed and boneless, hums softly, encouragingly.   Rook slides a large, warm hand round her shoulder, runs his fingers over her collarbone, slips a little lower and waits to see what will happen next.

The Detective – he really must find her name – nestles in, smiles sleepily, eyes three-quarters shut, hand lightly in Rook’s shirt; slow half-movements almost unconsciously sliding over the cotton.  She’s had a successful day, case closed, bad guy put away.  All the late nights, lack of sleep, catching up with her as the adrenaline drains down and out: not the cliff-edge crash it sometimes is, when she’s hard asleep almost before she hits the pillow, but a slow seepage, taking her tension, the driving need to solve the case harder, faster, _sooner_ , with it.  The unusual feeling of relaxation swirls around her, enclosed in warmth and the slow snare drum beat of Rook’s heart beneath her ear.  She doesn’t go in for soothing petting; that’s too much, too close to a real relationship where she might have to expose her own raw edges.  She’s not looking for one of those; yet somehow, some way, here she is, all snuggled up like it’s easy on Sunday morning; unwilling to move, to leave, go home and sleep alone, the way she ought to.

Rook likes this seldom – never – seen softness; a side of his fierce Detective that she’s not previously revealed to him.  She’s so sexy at full force, forward momentum and full speed ahead, bad-ass and just so _hot_ ; she wants him and she makes that clear, but she fights him every moment for dominance, fights his size and mass and bulk every instant, only gives in to him at the last possible point when she can’t deny what she wants, her own dark desires and midnight needs, any more: she wants him but she never openly says so, never asks, until he brings her to frantic begging beneath him.  But tonight is different, she is different, soft and yielding, all the hard angles turned to curves and the snap of command dissipated, dispersed.  He tucks her in closer, a little more protectively, cradling her in the crook of his arm, the cradle of his body, hoping to bring her closer to him, to understand and take away the pain he’s seen flickering through her eyes, to solve this mystery –

Castle abruptly stops his typing, appalled by what he’s just written.  He doesn’t want that.  He doesn’t need to know.  He’s already decided that’s not part of the game.  He just needs to get Detective Beckett out his system.  Take her to bed and be done.  He’ll get what he wants, they’ll both enjoy it, and then he can follow her team around for however long it takes, however many books, without this irritating tension, this burning need to know her story.  It’s only because she won’t succumb, though he knows she’s into him.  That’s all.

He’s sucker-punched by the sudden memory of the hot roar of possession that had thundered through him as that spoilt, cocky little rich boy had leered and ogled and wiped his slimy gaze all over Beckett; spoken to her as if she was some streetwalker or stripper to be mauled and disrespected.  Well, not while he, Castle, is around her.  The only man – _man_ , not some greasy, spotty, callow adolescent who’d never be Beckett’s choice or match – who’s going to touch Beckett, talk dirty to her, heat her up and turn her on and make all her overdeveloped control melt faster than snow in sunshine… is him.  No-one else.  She’s going to be his, for as long as he wants her, and he doesn’t share his toys.

Deep inside, in a small walled-off corner of his mind, he imprisons any hint of a notion that he’s lying to himself; that there’s already far more to this than simply having what he wants; far more than the sting of hurt pride and the hatred of failure.  He won’t fail: he’ll have her, and she’ll want him to; want him, too.  He’s _Rick Castle_ , and he doesn’t fail at anything, any more.


	6. Bad boys, bad boys

Over the next few days no new bodies drop.  Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean that Beckett gets peace and quiet.  Castle turns up at some point almost every day, far too rapidly insinuating himself into Ryan and Esposito’s affections with a detailed knowledge of almost every boy’s-own computer game ever made and what Beckett can only assume the boys take as flattering interest in everything they do and how they do it.  Shortly they’re trading fist bumps and banter and probably baseball cards, too.  It irritates her beyond belief to have her well-oiled team distracted in this way, though if she could bring herself to be fair she’d admit that their solve rate hasn’t dropped at all.  Even Montgomery’s best pals with her pain-in-the-ass shadow.  She’d thought he had more smarts than that, even if the boys don’t.

He wants to know everything about everything.  Never stops questioning, extracting details she didn’t even know she knew.  It’s an interrogation, every day. He stands, or sits, fractionally too close for comfort, all the time, taking up more space than is in any way necessary; the looming mass of physical bulk giving an edge of intimidation that’s all the more effective for being entirely unconscious.  She’s not sure that she could take him in a fight, if he were fit.  But he’s only a writer: not likely to be in shape, and she’s tough: she spars regularly with the big guys and with Espo, who’s the toughest man in the bullpen. 

He’s still a smug, arrogant irritant, but since he apologised he’s at least listened to what she says, respecting her control of the crime scenes and the cases.  And every so often he says something useful. 

But he hasn’t once failed to make it clear that he still wants her, without saying a single word – which is amazing, because he never _stops_ talking, and his voice slithers into her synapses and leaves her damp and frustrated.  He undresses her with his eyes, each morning, as if he knows that she wears silk, or lace, beneath; flimsy scraps of seduction, were anyone to see them; he watches her as if he’d bought those same scraps for her, or dressed her in them.  She likes attractive underwear: Victoria’s Secret, La Perla; it makes her feel good.  Powerful.  Just the knowledge that she could open her shirt and men would fall, open-mouthed, at her feet (and they have) adds an edge to her confidence, and it shows in the sway in her walk, the swing of her hips, the flow of her stride.

His gaze scorches down her skin, whenever the boys can’t see.  He’s putting a _lot_ of effort into showing her that he wants her, and deep inside the dark petals of desire unfold a little further.  She knows what she likes, and if he weren’t still so very obviously sure that he could have her whenever he wanted, he’d be exactly what she liked.  In her blazing dreams, he _is_ exactly what she likes: big and heavy, hard, hot and possessive.  With every dream, the next day becomes a little more charged, her movements more liquid, the heat that she doesn’t acknowledge ratchets up a little higher.  There’s a constant tension in the air, threads of unspoken want weaving into connections, bindings.  She’s hyper-aware of where he is, what he’s doing; constantly conscious of the movements of his large hands, long fingers; always completely controlled, precise.  She likes the implications in those fingers.  Oh yes.  If only she liked him.  But she doesn’t.  She hates the way he assumes he’ll have her, soon.  She hates the way he looks at her with the promise of dark, forbidden sex blazing in his eyes.  She hates the way he thinks she’ll change her mind.  She won’t.  No matter how good she knows it would be.  She won’t be that easy.  Not for anyone.

Today, her personal pestilence wants to see the gym.  She’s busy, with the paperwork that never grows less.  The mills of 1PP grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small.  So she tells him with a snap that he’ll have to wait until the end of the day, and hopes that a body will drop so that at least she can be out of this confining, claustrophobic, charged atmosphere.  Of course, she couldn’t be that lucky, and at the end of the day he’s reminding her of her promise to show him, as enthusiastic as a child in a new playground.  She doesn’t hasten to finish the final forms, tidies her desk with smooth, unhurried precision, leaning slightly forward to stow files away.  She knows he’s looking at the vee in her button-down, precisely calculated to reveal nothing and promise everything.

He follows her upstairs, attention riveted on the way she moves.  He’s never seen a woman with this fluid, feline grace before, not even on the catwalks.  Her legs would make angels cast aside their wings and harps and halos, just for the promise of seeing her smooth sashay and the hope of uncovering them, stroking from heel to hip, and inward, and having them wrapped around their waist.  Oh, the heat that he’d generate in her with ministrations to those legs -  He abruptly realises that he has a name for _his_ Detective: the one who does everything, anything, he wants her to.  Heat. That’s her surname. She’ll have a given name, soon.  Something spiky, edgy, provocative. He watches Beckett – she’s Beckett, now, it’s what the bullpen calls her, how she answers her phone, a sharp snap of command even in that one word, but he still doesn’t even know her first name, so how can he hope to command her – and thinks about the possibilities inherent in, and between, those legs. And suddenly he has the whole name.   Nikki.  Nikki Heat.  Sharp, long, angular Ks make the name just right.

The gym is shabby, the walls emanating the aroma of sweat, and institutional exercises; the aura of purpose from uniformed service penetrating everything, a focused intensity directed to the simple goal of catching criminals.  There’s no kit, no machines, just lockers against the wall, a door through to some showers, and a punchbag to one side.  There are mats on the floor, a dirty brownish-grey, rough-surfaced from, he presumes, years of cop training and sparring.  Utilitarian, and so very different from his own top-class facility, all the latest training machines, sparkling clean, screens to watch or docks for the i-Pod that he listens to.

“Do you train here?”  He can’t quite picture it, Beckett in sweats in this dingy room.

“Defensive drills.  Sparring.”  She doesn’t allow him a single syllable of response beyond the absolute minimum.  He raises a disbelieving, arrogant eyebrow, deliberately running his gaze up and down every inch of her body.

“You?  Spar?” 

He knows what he’s doing.  If he can’t get her attention one way, he’s going to do it another.  He’s going to show her that he can take her in a fight: that he’s not just some useless, feeble Writer-Boy.  He’s heard her refer to him as that, with an edge of hard contempt that flicks him on the raw every time she uses it.  He’ll show her he’s a man, not a boy.  ( _You’re too young, Ricky.  I’m going with a senior, not a freshman._ )  And it seems that the only way to do that is to prove his masculinity in the ways she sees around her in the bullpen: intelligence, shooting, sparring.  He’s trying intelligence, and it hasn’t worked yet; he hasn’t had a chance to shoot.  So, sparring, with Beckett.  To do that, he needs to make her angry enough that she’ll challenge him.  After that, however good she is, his weight and height and reach should prove decisive.  He’ll pin her to the mat, and then she’ll see him.  Oh yes, she’ll see him then.  He thinks he sees her: there’s the occasional flicker in her eyes that speaks of intrigue and interest, and he hasn’t forgotten the way she assessed his body the first day he arrived here.  Nor is he unaware of the spiralling tension between them: it’s not only he who’s aware of her.

“Yes.”  It’s bitten off, clipped short.  He looks even more disbelieving.

“You’re too small to take down the big guys.”  Got her.  There’s a flare of absolute fury in her eyes.

“I’ve taken down plenty bigger guys than you.”

“Prove it.  Bet you can’t take me down.”  It’s an effort to add that last word.  But the tone of _I don’t believe you can_ has had exactly the right effect.  She’s too angry to think about what she’s saying.

“I can.”

“If you can’t, you come out to dinner.”

“Done.” 

It’s only when she sees the triumphant look on his face that she realises what she’s just committed to.  Not just getting up close and personal sparring with Rick- _millionaire-playboy_ -Castle but if she loses, going to dinner with him.  _Fuck_.  She’s been, quite expertly, played.  _Fuck._   It occurs to her, with a trail of creeping horror, that he’s actually intelligent, and worse, he’s used that and three weeks of _research_ to work out at least some of her triggers. _Shit_.  Still, she’s fully fit, in training, and she’s never backed down from a challenge in her whole adult life.  She’s not going to start now.  She’ll take him down.  It’s an effort to add the last word.  The thought of a very … physical… exchange of opinions is slithering through her synapses, pooling low down in her body.  She smiles, and there are knives in it.

“Any time you’re ready, Writer-Boy.”  She doesn’t hide the derision in her voice.

He smiles, slowly, darkly; hints of midnight in his eyes.  “Later tonight.”  The smile adds a broken-glass edge.  “Wouldn’t want you to lose in front of your team.”  It’s not his plan to see her humiliated in public, or indeed at all.  That won’t get him what he wants, and more, it’s unfair.  The time he’s already spent here has shown him that she’s a damn good cop, and he’s not going to do anything to damage that.  Not after he’d been so very comprehensively reduced to nothing after that nanny.  But he’s getting to her.  He intends to win.  The sparring match, and her.  He always gets what he wants.  It hasn’t occurred to him that he’s already put far more effort into getting the apparently completely unreceptive Beckett than he’s bothered expending on any woman ever before.  Proximity, and antagonism, have not abated his obsession in any way.  The more she pushes him away, the harder he pushes forward.  He needs to know her.  In so very many ways.

“You’re on.  But I won’t lose.”

She doesn’t go home. She’d rather sit staring at her murder board, trying to get some use out the dead time.  She has sweatpants and a T-shirt in her locker, a towel to clean up after.  But all the time she’s working she can feel the sharp thrum of arousal, pressing on her mind, sparking in her veins.  She’s made certain she never touches him, never lets him touch her, even accidentally, after the nanny.  The way he looks at her is disturbing enough.  And now he’s tricked her into sparring.  She’d better win this, in short order.

By the time Castle returns it’s close to ten and the bullpen’s empty and dark, except for the small puddle of light around Beckett and the murder board.  He takes a moment simply to view her silhouette, and deal with the stab of hard desire.  He’ll need to concentrate, if he intends to win.  If he gets distracted, he’s no doubt at all that Beckett, who will be fully focused on defeating him, will tear him to metaphorical shreds.  So he won’t be distracted.  Which may well be difficult.  The thought of finally putting his hands on Beckett has been distracting him for four hours.  He hasn’t failed to spot that she’s avoided so much as a brush of fingers since the day she pulled him in for questioning, except that once, when she was too angry to notice or care.  He files that, along with certain other pieces of evidence, for later consideration. 

“Ready?” he asks, in his best obnoxious, arrogant, tone.  He’s going to put her off-balance, angry, before she even begins.  He notes with annoyance that she hasn’t even bothered to change yet.  If she thinks that she can throw him off his game by making him wait, she’s wrong.  He’s very patient, when he’s stalking something he wants.

“Bring it on.”  She’s halfway up the stairs to the gym before she’s finished the words.  He follows at his own, leisurely, pace.  He won’t be hurried, in this or any other dealings with Beckett.  Oh no, he won’t hurry at all.  Not even if – when - she begs him to. He’ll make her wait.  Just like she’s making him wait to have her.

Beckett realises that this might not be as easy as she’d thought when she comes out, changed, and takes a good look at Castle.  In T-shirt and sweats it’s clear that he’s a lot more muscular than a writer has any right to be.  In fact, he looks very, very fit, and the dark edge of danger is palpable.  And he’s a lot bigger than she’d thought, now she’s in bare feet.  A twinge of uncertainty, swiftly followed by a twinge of heat, flicks over her.  He’s seriously hot.  And she hates that she’s noticed it now, when she has to win, can’t afford to be distracted.

They’re circling each other, sizing up, searching for the tells and signals that will give one of them an edge.  Beckett’s beginning to worry that she might not win: she has the impression that Castle’s done this before.  He looks practised: relaxed and easy.  She spars with the big guys, but Castle’s at least the size of any of them, and he’s got an agenda that the others don’t.  She’s never had the slightest interest in any of them, nor they in her.  Neither is necessarily true now, and she remembers that there is nobody else around at all.  The conviction that this was a bad idea takes firm root.  Mixing it with the bad boys in a dark and empty building is something she thought she’d left behind.  The slither of arousal reminds her she hasn’t.  She knows what she likes, but hard body or not, she doesn’t even like him.  But he’s just so damn sexy, and she can’t get him out of her dreams.  If she told herself the truth, she’d admit she doesn’t want to.  In her hot, dark, edgy dreams, he’s _exactly_ what she wants.

She’s still circling, waiting her chance, never taking her eyes off him, tracking the feints and movements, despite her thinking.  When he moves, she’s ready, slips to the left and evades him, comes round with a kick that should have rocked his kidneys – except he isn’t there, he’s just out of strike range.  It’s her turn to try an attack move, sweeping to take his legs away, following up with a body punch that connects and makes him exhale hard.  She sees it with dark satisfaction, gains confidence and begins to come forward into the fight, pressing him hard.

Castle is impressed.  Beckett’s clearly learned how to make the best of her abilities, and she’s vicious.  He wonders momentarily if she’s rough in bed, scratching and clawing and fighting for what she wants, a wildcat.  He likes the thought, likes the idea that he could tame her into a purring kitten as he strokes her.  He returns all his attention as she lands a full-blooded kick into his shoulder.  But she’s missed one thing, because criminals clearly aren’t very subtle in a fight.  She hasn’t realised that he isn’t using his much longer reach to keep her at a distance any more.  In fact, he has a strategy: let her get in close and then trap her.  She’s still advancing, thinking that because he’s solely defending she has the advantage of him, lands another painful combination of solid hits – he’s watching her carefully, since he doesn’t believe for one moment that she won’t fight dirty if she thinks she’ll win by doing so, and he’d like his assets intact – and shifts that one final critical step into range.

He pounces on her, catching both wrists and pulling her off balance, using all his weight and her momentum to bring her in, taking her feet away with a swept kick then letting her fall, dropping over her as the breath rushes out her lungs and pinning her to the mat.  When she tries to bring a knee up to incapacitate him he gives in to all his urges and rolls on to her, holding her hands above her head, taking part of his own weight on his elbows,  and pushing her feet apart so there’s no way she can pull any of the dirtier tricks he can think of.  He likes this: Beckett spread and pinioned under him, sweat-slicked and panting.  This is the first step to what he’d wanted since the first moment he saw her, and now he’s got it.  She’s still struggling to reverse the positions, but she doesn’t have the weight or the leverage.  He’s won, and there’s no way she can argue with it.

Beckett is furious with herself.  She’d given him one opening, and he’d taken it.  And now she’s lost the fight, and the bet, and she’s flat on her back with Castle on top of her in a very compromising position and smirking like there’s no tomorrow.  Worst of all, having his weight pressing down against her and her hands trapped is reminding her almost irresistibly of her hot, edgy dreams; she’s suddenly aware of just how heavy his big body is and where he’s resting and how little it would take to arch up and rub against him.  She can feel wetness begin to gather at her core, her nipples hardening, desire unfolding and stretching out inside her body and her mind.   His expression is changing too, from smirk to dark, focused intent, and she becomes very aware that she’s not the only one excited by this position.  She stops struggling, before she turns it into … some other form of movement against his hard arousal.  It’s all too close to how she’d dreamed, and maybe his personality is annoying but his physicality is certainly… not.   

“Do you accept I’ve won?”  She growls unhappily.

“Yes,” she spits out.  “You can move now.”  Before she gives in to her own instincts and rubs up against him in a very particular way.  She hates him, but she wants him, but she won’t give in to what she wants when he is so damn annoying and so damn sure she’ll capitulate.  But she really wants him.

“Oh, I don’t know that I want to, Beckett.  I like this position.  Don’t you?  I really think this is very nice indeed: you pinned under me.  I liked it even more when you were squirming, but you stopped.  I won’t mind if you start again, though.”  He smiles, deliberately happily, at the look of fury on her face.  He’s quite sure that she’s planning how best to kill him and hide the body.  She’s so _hot_ when she’s angry.  Especially when she’s angry and aroused.  He wants her, more than he’s wanted anything for a very long time.

For an instant he considers simply kissing her, possessing her lips and conquering her mouth.  He can feel that she’s excited, sees her eyes darken and her gaze drop to his mouth, senses the control she’s hanging on to by a single fine thread, and if he took her mouth right now she’d be right there in it.  She bites her lip and it’s almost irresistible.  He wants to bite back.  But she’s his obsession and he’s going to make sure when he does have her she’ll be there for as long as he wants her.  That means waiting for her to learn that she wants him.  He’ll deal with his desire later.  He can feel another chapter of his private book shoving against the edges of his mind.  And anticipation is the best sauce.  It’ll be so much more satisfying when _she_ comes to _him_.  When she gives in to the pull between them.

“I’ll let you know where dinner will be in good time.  You’ll need a dress.” He sits back on his heels, pulling her up to sitting in front of him, watching her dilated eyes and parted lips.  “Till tomorrow, Beckett.  We could always do this again then.  You seemed to like it.  I’ll be happy to oblige, any time.” 

As he leaves, he hears the pounding of fists and feet against a punchbag.


	7. Dressed to kill

She’s still angry the following day, when he slides a slip of paper under her nose with the address of the restaurant on it.  She recognises it, small, exclusive, intimate; not the sort of publicly famous place that she expects this spoilt, attention seeking writer to choose.

“You’ll want to wear a dress, if you want to fit in.  Do you even own a dress?” he whispers, making it clear that he doesn’t expect it.  “I’ve never even seen you wear a skirt.”  His insultingly obvious disbelief in her ability to dress in something other than pants fires her blood, and even though she _knows_ he’s playing her, she can’t step back from the line.  She’ll show him how well she can dress.  She’ll leave him drooling and helpless in front of her, and then she’ll walk away after dinner and leave him frustrated, hot and wanting.  Two can play this angry, arousing game, and she intends to show him everything he can’t have, trail temptation in front of him and not give in herself.  But deep inside she knows she’s dancing on the blade of the razor, because dressing the way she intends to would mean that she were issuing an open invitation for the whole night, if it were any other man.  She feels the thrill of danger, and welcomes it.  And just a little, under all her fury, she wonders if she can make him lose control, bring him to the point where he wants her so badly he’ll just reach out and take it.  Take her.  Heat slithers down her nerves, slinks secretively through her mind, at the thought.  If she can make him lose control… then she’s won, in this game of resistance.

She dresses with extreme care.  Silk underwear in stark black against her ivory skin, caressing the curves it minimally covers.   This set is her favourite, and wearing it makes her feel feline, feral.  Thigh high hold ups, lace topped.  If she sits just right – and she knows exactly how to sit to do it - there’ll be a flick of lace visible, just at the hem of her dress.  She’ll make him look twice, thrice, and more.  And he won’t ever be able to touch.  Dark satisfaction prowls through her body.  The dress fits her to perfection, promises everything and gives nothing.  It’s a dress to tantalise, to tease, to drive men wild.  Black heels, higher than she’d wear to work, changing her walk from the confident strut of daytime to the sensual slither of deep, starless night.  And to cover it all, a dark cashmere wrap, sinfully soft against her shoulders.  Hair slicked up, a lone tendril teasing at her neck, just below her ear, drawing attention to the pale smooth skin, unmarked.  Waiting to be marked, perhaps.  No jewellery except the chain she always wears.  Eyes made huge with black mascara and smudged liner, lipstick that screams to be removed.  She looks herself up and down in the mirror, and there are sharp edges in her dark smile.  She’s dressed to kill, and in a restaurant downtown the victim’s waiting to die.

He expects her to be late, and so he’s not surprised to find it so.  She’s trying to prove that he can’t control her, but he won’t be rattled by that move.  He’ll have her.  Soon enough.  Her reactions to being pinned down on the gym floor had been very revealing.  She’s not only fighting him.  She’s fighting herself.  And he still doesn’t know why, can’t see why she should back away from something that they’d both enjoy – till he’d had enough of her, just like he’s got bored of nearly every other woman in the last twenty years - though he thinks that the flash of pain, the occasional off-key reaction, and the thick layers of reserve and ice are all connected.

And then she walks in, shrugs her shoulders and lets the wrap fall away and _oh fuck she’s got to be mine_ is all his addled brain can think as he stands to greet her.

She’s wearing a shimmer of sin, sex in a silk slip dress, nightfall stroking from her shoulders to six inches above the knee, midnight heels whispering _take me_ with every step and _fuck_ he has never seen anything so hot in his whole entire life.  It takes all his hard won control and every scrap of acting ability he’s ever had not to seize her mouth till she’s moaning, then walk her out the door, push her up against a wall and take everything that dress promises.  But he’s not that man.  She’s done this quite deliberately, and while he applauds her intelligence, and her ability to read him like he’s a Times Square advert, he’s not going to dance to her tune.  He really isn’t.  He is _not_ going to lose control like a frat boy at his first party.  He thinks about glaciers for a moment or two.  It barely helps.  Instead he smiles, putting a heavy hint of _so you dressed up to please me_ behind it.  He’s astonished that he’s managed to do so, given that all he can think is _mine, bed, now_.  He sees the exact moment she recognises it, and the fury behind her eyes as he slowly looks her up and down, showing her his heat as he thinks of peeling her slowly out of the dress, nipping and licking and sucking all the way down.  He’s suddenly certain, from only the way that she undulates towards the table, that under the seductive silk dress is the sort of underwear that nice girls don’t even _think_ about wearing.  Detective Beckett is obviously not a _nice_ girl.  She might well be a very naughty girl indeed.  He halts that train of thought before he drags her out the door to find out.   

“You clean up _good_ , Detective Beckett.”  She flicks a contemptuous glance at him, and doesn’t bother to answer.  He politely pulls her chair out for her, waving away the waiter, and waits while she seats herself.  When she crosses her legs and he thinks he sees a flash of black lace skirting the hem of her dress, he _knows_ she’s a bad girl.  Game _on_ , Detective.  Oh, very much game on.  She forces out a _thank you_ through obviously gritted teeth, manners – just – defeating anger.  But he can’t stop looking at her legs.  She doesn’t even re-cross them, and he just can’t help staring in case she does.

His dropped jaw and stunned expression would have made her feel so much better, if he hadn’t got his game face back almost immediately.  She hangs on to the thought that she’s rocked his world, and however much he’s covering up he can’t hide that exposure of his shock and wholesale arousal.  She sits slightly sideways on the chair, and resists the temptation to cross and uncross her legs a few more times, for effect.  That would be tacky.  She doesn’t do tacky.  It looks like she doesn’t need to, either.  He hasn’t taken his eyes off her legs since she walked in.  Suddenly her feral, satisfied mood is reinstated.  He’s completely unable to hold on to his composure.  She smiles slowly, and flexes her shoulders just a little.  That gets his attention off her legs, though it still hasn’t made it to her face.

“Eyes are up here, Castle.”  There’s an undertone to her voice.  He thinks it’s … _satisfaction_?  Definitely not a _nice_ girl.  Mmmm.  Maybe this evening might end rather better than he’d expected.  He produces a slow, significant smile of his own and brings his gaze very deliberately up to her face.

“I like the dress, Beckett.  Not your usual style.”

“Wouldn’t want to be predictable, Castle.”

“You’re never that.” 

No.  If she were predictable, she’d have been in bed with him four weeks ago.  He stops.  Has he really been chasing after Beckett for four weeks already?  And she  _still_ hasn’t succumbed?  What’s she taking?  More to the point, what’s  _he_ taking, that he hasn’t just given up?  Well, he knows that.  The more she backs off, the more determined he is that he’ll get what he wants.  He changes the subject of his thoughts.  If all she’s interested in is her job, well, he wants to know everything about her job, (and her, but he’s ignoring that idea in the hope it’ll get bored and go away.  He doesn’t need to know anything about her, beyond the job) and if he manages to start her talking then maybe he can manoeuvre the conversation round to more… interesting… subjects when she’s a little less closed off.  Because despite the dress and her clear satisfaction at stunning him into momentary silence, she’s about as open to discussion – verbal or physical - as a bank vault.

“What’ll happen to that boy from the last case?  I mean, what happens once we’re” – she raises a delicately cynical eyebrow – “you’re – finished with him, once he’s confessed.”  And… it works.  Interrupted only by ordering – he’s not dumb enough to try ordering for her – and eating, she runs through the whole procedure, adding some explanatory comments every time he asks for more detail. It might be more words than she’s ever been required to say to him at one time.  Under every word, her anger at his effect on her ratchets up a little further, her frustration that she has to answer him builds, and the tension across the table, which has only a very small part to do with either that anger or that frustration, tightens.  But when she’s finished telling him about the process, she looks a little remote, and the tension disappears.

“Such a waste.” 

“What’s a waste?”

“Both lives wasted.  Both dead.  They’d got everything in front of them, and it was all taken away.”  She’s looking out into some far space, now with something he doesn’t know how to interpret in her eyes.  It’s another off-key reaction, not just normal empathy for the situation.

“You okay?”  She snaps back to the here-and-now from wherever she went, shakes her head as if to clear it. 

“Yeah.”  There’s no intimation that she wants to continue that line of conversation.  Chopped off short.  A bit like her dress.  She crosses her legs and he’s instantly distracted.  His mind flips back to the dress, and the slightly larger hint of lace now visible at the hem.  Suddenly the tension’s right back.

Beckett pulls her mind off her own history and realises that Castle is looking very curiously at her: quite unlike the undressing, assessing gaze that he normally produces when they’re alone.  When he asks if she’s okay it almost sounds like a genuine query.  But she doesn’t want to talk about that.  So she cuts him off by re-crossing her legs and watches him lose his train of thought.  That’s better.  She runs her own gaze over him while he isn’t looking and thinks about the heat currently burning behind his eyes and in his voice and the edge of danger he’d displayed when they were sparring.  He’s big, and she suspects that if he wanted to be, he’d be frightening.  He’s certainly big enough to be, well, _up to her weight_.  So to speak.  She remembers that she’d been inclined to test the boundaries of his control.  She considers whether to do that, to distract him further, well away from her history.  She badly wants to win this game, regain the advantage, leave him as much of a mess as he’s making her.  She’ll make him dream of her, tonight.

She excuses herself and makes absolutely certain that she walks to the restroom with the swaying, slinky, catwalk sashay that she’d learnt from other models, a long time ago.  She knows every male eye in the restaurant is welded to her walk, and it feels so _good_.  In particular, Castle’s gaze is burning a hole in her back.  Oh yes.  She’s going to make _him_ burn, and then go home.  Alone.  She hasn’t done this since she was nineteen and teasing seemed like a good plan, but she doesn’t care that in normal operating mode she wouldn’t ever do this in a million years.  She doesn’t care that she doesn’t promise and then not deliver.  (Not that she’s done either in a long time.)  She doesn’t care that there are words for what she’s doing, and none of them are pleasant.  Her temper’s up at boiling point, has been since the moment he appeared in her nice, civilised, solitary life; and _all_ she cares about is turning him into a shuddering wreck and making him as hot and frustrated and angry as she is.  And then she’ll feel better, and he’ll just _go away_.  No man would stay after being treated like this.

She washes her hands as slowly as possible to buy herself some time and checks herself out in the mirror.  She looks spectacular, the anger flaming in her mind lending fire to her eyes.  When she walks back out she’s prowling, the fluid, feline slink of a leopard on the hunt.

Castle is extremely interested in Beckett’s current behaviour.  If it had been any other woman, he’d have known exactly how to interpret it: and he’d have been planning how to gently disabuse her of her obvious hopes.  But it’s not any other woman, it’s Beckett, and he doesn’t believe for a moment that her performance – this is clearly a performance; and although behind it there might be as much real desire for him to take her home, slowly strip her naked, and turn her into a hot, melted mess as he has to do it he doesn’t think that she’s allowing that to hit her mind – has anything at all to do with wanting him to take her home.  Which he does.  So much.  Every move she makes and word she says with that slightly husky, unconscious undertone screams sex; not gentle kisses and soft strokes, delicately twisting the tension tighter and bringing both parties to complete culmination, but hot, hard, dirty sex, the sort that rips clothes and leaves marks and doesn’t make it to the bed.  He can give her that, no question, pin her to the wall and make her scream.  He watches her flow back to the table, and imagines how she’d flow around him.

“You walk like a model.  Ever been one?”

“No,” she lies.  Her history isn’t relevant to this association.  She sees a whisper of disbelief in his eyes and doesn’t care that he’s guessed she’s lying.

“That’s a shame.  You’d have been good at it.”   And _gotcha, Beckett_ as she rises to the bait.

“I’d rather be doing something meaningful, not prancing down a catwalk.  Finding justice for -”  She slams her mouth shut on the rest of that sentence.

“For?”  He can’t resist the question.  There was another flash of that strange, off-key reaction.

“For the relatives of the victim.”  But there’d been a suspicious pause.  A whole wall of tiles suddenly slides into perfect alignment to form the whole pattern in his mind. He already knows something really bad happened to someone close to her, that the person responsible was never caught.  Now he knows that she hasn’t got past it: that, most likely, it was murder, and the killer was never caught.  He reminds himself that he doesn’t need or want to learn this, and swiftly changes the subject.

“Would you like dessert?” he asks smoothly, and sees the catwalk centrefold reappear.

Time for some more distraction, Beckett thinks.  “Yes, thank you.”  It’s certainly the best meal she’s had in months; she might as well enjoy it to the hilt.  She’ll not be coming out to dinner, or anywhere else, with Writer-Boy again, after the way she’s about to deal with him.  She’s going to wreck him, and then walk away.

Dessert is delicious, every slow, slithering spoonful, tongued delicately from the cutlery and savoured, rolled around her mouth, any stray smudge licked from her lips.  By the time she’s done Castle is speechless, fixated on her mouth and clearly imagining everything else she might be able to do.  She’ll be surprised if he can stand, let alone walk, now.  Dinner’s over.   She’d rather have coffee at home.  And she’s got through this meal, shown Castle everything he can’t have, without giving into her own desire, fuelled by the way she’s dressed and the expression he can’t hide, or revealing anything about herself.  She can go back to work tomorrow perfectly satisfied.  And with only a little bit of luck, after this he won’t be there.

“Thank you for dinner,” she says very politely and very coolly.  Castle whips his eyes up to hers, and _dammit_ he still seems to be able to function.  Hell.  What does she have to do to leave him whimpering and useless?

“Oh, but surely we’re not done.  It’s been such a nice evening” – that’s an interesting interpretation of _nice_ – “I wouldn’t like it to end so soon.”  He smiles deviously.  “Wouldn’t you like coffee?”

“No thank you.  I have to get home.  Some of us have to work for a living.”

“As you wish.”  He acquires and settles the check with one small flick of the eyes towards the waiter.  “Of course, it wouldn’t be polite not to escort you home.”  He puts on a saintly expression which deceives Beckett not at all.  “Can’t leave your date to go home alone.  It’s not polite.”   Her mouth drops open, and she snaps it shut.  _Date_?  This is not a _date_.  But he’s daring her to object with every crinkle around those wicked, wicked blue eyes, and he’s somehow purloined her wrap from the waiter and is holding it out for her and she just cannot see how to get out of the next ten seconds without causing the sort of scene that will appear on page six regardless of how discreet this restaurant is.  She’s spent four weeks ensuring he never touches her, and from his expectant, dark, hungry look that’s running through each synapse and prickling down her spine and pooling in places she shouldn’t be thinking about with him only inches away, he’s not only noticed it, he’s intending to remedy it.  She gathers all her self control.  She can do this.  He’s just an irritant: a hyperactive, childish irritant who won’t stay out her sleep.  Even if he’s big and muscular and intelligent and a bad boy who’s capable of taking her in a fight and leaves her sated and satisfied in all her dreams.   (She doesn’t think how not-childish he was, lying over her and pinning her down on the gym mat, how good it felt.   She won’t.)  She can deny him that satisfaction too.  She can.  She will.

And then he slithers the wrap around her shoulders, and slips hard fingertips against her clavicles, and smooths it over her back down to the limit of public acceptability and no matter how hard she tells herself to _stay still_ she shudders because his touch scorches all the way down.  And of course he notices.  And smirks.

“Cold, Beckett?  Just as well I’ve got us a car.  That’ll warm you up.”  This is not helping.  Being in the dark, constricting privacy of the back of a town car with Castle is a bad idea.  Much like sparring with him had been.  She knows exactly what can be done in the lightless back of a car, with a little imagination and flexibility.

“I’d rather not.”  She knows it’s rude.  From the flash of sardonic amusement across his face, Castle has rather too rapidly worked out why.

“If you like.  But I’m still escorting you home.  I’d never forgive myself if you didn’t make it home safely.”  He grins.  “That dress is too small to hide your gun.  So’s your purse.  So you don’t have it.  Ergo, you can’t claim that you do.”   He’s right, and the knowledge that betrays is infuriating.  “So I’m escorting you home just like a gentleman should.”  He doesn’t look very gentlemanly at all.  More rakish.  Wolfish.  Predatory.  “Shall we go?”

“Yes.”  It’s said in an infinitely discouraging tone.  Castle, however, is anything but discouraged.  Touching Beckett had been enormously interesting.  Her reaction had been extremely enlightening.  Detective Beckett might be pretending she doesn’t want anything to do with him but he’d been right, she’d been avoiding his touch because she’s _pretending_.  Mmmm.  Time to switch it a little.  She’ll come to him.  Oh yes.  Because now he knows she’s into him too.  Even if she’s not admitting it.  So now he knows that he’ll have her.  Soon.  It’ll be soon, that _she_ comes to _him_.  He’ll cure this stupid obsession.


	8. Bad girls do it well

Castle holds the car door for her and doesn’t do anything else… troublesome.  He takes up far too much space even in a town car but he isn’t crowding her.  She’d expected him to.  He doesn’t do anything inappropriate at all.  Beckett tells herself that’s a good thing and ignores her unwanted, unwarranted disappointment.  Letting him touch her was a big mistake.  It’s all going perfectly well until she realises that by _escorting her home_ Castle meant right to her door.  He’s doing so with a hand placed over her back which is sending sensual shivers resonating in her veins and, while he’s not moving his hand at all, it’s still making her think of all the things a big man could do to her, with her, for her.  Heat flows through her; liquid fire pooling at her centre. 

And now they’re at her door, and she’s trying to find her keys, and he’s far too close for her peace of mind.  She locates the keys, unlocks the door, looks up to say thank you politely – she’ll keep her manners, no matter how infuriating she finds him – and discovers his arms one on either side of her, not quite touching her.  He’s leaning down, big, muscular, dangerous; and his expression tells her that he’s thinking of all the dark, dirty, sexy things that they might do together.  She breathes out a sigh, bites her lip deliberately, gives the same look back, watches him take a quick breath and turns away to go inside – only to find herself turned back.  

Castle spins Beckett back to face him, because now he’s got a plan.  He’s not going to be defeated in bedroom matters by a cop ten years younger than he.  It’s become a competition, and he hates to lose.  He’ll make her admit she wants him, because he is absolutely not going any further than a goodnight kiss if she doesn’t.  She’s so tempting, lips a little parted, face a little flushed, breathing a little harder, which makes her body shift under the minimal dress in such very enticing ways.

“Not nice, Beckett.  We should finish our first date properly.”  And he leans the last few inches over and kisses her; hot and possessive and _oh_ she’s immediately wide open to him and brings her hands to his neck and _oh_ she wants this as much as he does and she tastes so good and _oh_ this is what he’s been hoping for since he first saw her, since she walked into the restaurant spreading sin and seduction and when he raises his head her eyes are dilated deep dark emerald and she is absolutely into this.  _Let’s begin, Beckett_. 

Or rather, he’s going to begin.  Detective Beckett began, he realises with considerable annoyance, the very first time they met.  Summed him up in seconds, he thinks, and began the game without even telling him.  She’s currently on the offense: first down and goal for a four-touchdown lead at the end of the second quarter.  Time for him to catch up.  He should never have waited to kiss her, should never have thought he could let her resist him for this long.

And on that thought he leans in and kisses her for the second time, slowly and seductively and with absolute authority.  This time he doesn’t pull back, leave her mouth.  This time she’s already opening to him, already curving into him, before he even touches her lips.  But this is a corridor where anyone might see, and the current between them is arcing white-hot, and so he shoves her door open and pushes her through it and closes it with his foot behind them.

It’s all hit overdrive, the instant he kissed her.  _This_ is why she didn’t let him touch her, because she _knew_ she’d turn to quicksilver, molten under his hands and mouth, and she’d not refuse him anything at all.  He feels so good: hard body and clever fingers, hot lips and ravaging tongue, quick possessive bites on her lower lip mimicking her own tells, taller and so much broader than she, pinning her against her own door with his bulk and dominating her mouth.  It’s exactly what her body wants, needs, and though she wasn’t going to let him, wasn’t going to do this, now she’s started she isn’t going to stop.  Even at this early stage she knows if she says _Stop_ he will.  That much she’s very clear on.  She can do this once and then be done.  She wants this – not him, absolutely not him, just _this_ \- so very badly.  So she fights back, duelling with her own mouth and tongue, undoing his shirt, his belt, till he stops her, then pushing against his muscle to see whether he can hold her in place, keep her pressed between the door and his thick hard weight. 

“Is this what you want, Beckett?”

“Yes.”  It’s hissed out on a long breathy sigh.  “You clean?”  He nods.  “I’m protected.”  His mouth is otherwise occupied at her earlobe. His hands are on her thighs and he’s sliding his thumbs upward, taking the hem of her dress with them, and when he discovers and exposes the lace hold ups there’s nothing left on his face but sheer raw lust.  But he doesn’t hurry.  He strokes very slowly over the lace, under its edge, and smiles darkly, wickedly, promising sin and seduction and sinister delights.

“I think we’ll leave these on, Beckett.  For now.”  It’s a deep husky rasp which squirms into her viscera, leaches down from her stomach and leaves her hotter, wetter than before, desperate for more.   She makes a noise she wishes she hadn’t, betraying a loss of control she doesn’t want to admit to, and moves against his hand, trying to bring his fingers to where she wants them, because he might be irritating and annoying and a complete pain in the ass, but he is so unbelievably good at this that right now she just doesn’t care.  She can’t even remember why this is not a good idea.

When he skims his fingers up over her quads and stops at the top of the lace, he can barely keep control, so turned on, even though he’d been sure that’s what she was wearing, that it’s almost painful, wondering what else she’s barely wearing.  But he needs to keep this slow and controlled and make sure that it’s she who’s desperate first, so he lets his fingers flirt under the stocking tops until she’s rolling into him and trying to force him to touch her elsewhere and emitting sounds that he’s sure she doesn’t know she’s making.  And then he takes his hands away and she whimpers – _whimpers!_ – and he pulls the slice of seduction that she’d called a dress off over her head… and steps back and just stares.  She’s the centrefold for the Seventh Deadly Sin, a succubus in sheer silk.  Any control he might have maintained has snapped, and he doesn’t regret its loss for a moment.  He stops himself for just long enough to run his fingers across her, finds her soaked and flicks over her so she gasps and moans, and then he pushes the thin silk aside and thrusts into her with no ceremony at all, just taking her, making her his, possession and ownership of her mouth and her body and _mine you’re all mine Beckett_ with each hard slide and it only takes moments before she screams out his name and he groans out hers and both of them have come _hard_.

The first round had happened so fast that all he remembers after the eidetic memory of her out of that dress is the feel of her slim body under his grasping, gripping hands and her shattering around him and pulling him over with her.  He’d meant, when he kissed her, simply, _only_ , to kiss her goodnight, maybe a couple of times, show her how good he could make her feel and then leave.  He’d been perfectly confident, whatever she’d done to him in the restaurant (thank God for long tablecloths and ice water) that that would have been enough for her to realise that she should want him, and that then she’d come to him.  He wouldn’t have to try any more, any harder, than that, and he’d still be in control of this silent, seductive war.

But then she’d instantly opened under his demands and everything he’d planned had flown out the window at Mach Five.  He couldn’t have let go of her if he’d been shot.  It was probably a very good thing that she’d avoided his touch in the precinct, because he is very certain that interrogation rooms are not sufficiently private for the apparently inevitable result.  Just those two kisses, and she’d incinerated all his vaunted control, dissolved all his determination to turn her into the writhing, melting flow of liquid sensation that he’d imagined and dreamed about and written out; while still himself retaining control and firmly in charge of proceedings, destroying deliberately and slowly all Beckett’s icy shell.  

He’d _intended_ – eventually, not tonight, he’d only meant to kiss her, tonight - to reduce her to a shivering, quivering wreck, clinging to him and begging him and then only capable of formless noise and frantic, desperate motion and finally screaming his name as she came under his fingers and mouth and body, over and over again; showing her his dominance, his mastery of the game.

It hadn’t worked like that at all.

He’d never, ever expected to react as he had.  He’s _Rick Castle_ , ruggedly handsome and famously cool; Casanova reputation and page six darling; liked, loved, and in control.  He doesn’t lose control just because of a smoking hot body.  It just _does not happen_.  And yet, here it has.

Now he absolutely has to get this back on track. Back to normality: him in control, her desperate.  That’ll ensure she wants him for longer: as long as he wants her.  And he will most certainly enjoy every single touch, and kiss, and stroke, and lick, and thrust; as much as she.  That first time has barely scratched the surface of what he wants to do to and with and for her, and by the end of this evening he’ll be so deep inside her senses and her body and her mind that she’ll be with him for as long as he wants.  Which he’s already thinking is longer than the single night he’d originally thought would be all that he would want.

She issues directions to her bedroom and he starts to wind her up _properly_ : teases as he walks her there, hands roving before, behind, between, above, below; licensed to go anywhere they please; holding her upright when her knees begin to fail.  He lays her out across her bed, dark hair and eyes and slashes of midnight lingerie against ivory skin and ivory linens with ivory needlework patterns, high heels and hold-ups still sheathing those stunning legs.  She is unbelievably gorgeous, flushed delicately at her cheeks and collarbones, a sultry look that makes him simply want to fall on top of her and take her all over again.  _Not this time, Rick_.  This time he’s going to take it slowly, learn what she likes, teach her what he likes, (Her.  He likes her.) find out what suits them both.  He leans over and kisses her hard and deep, one hand twisted into the hair at the base of her skull, angling her head so that he can taste every inch of her moist mouth.

He’s big and heavy and _oh god_ he is exactly what she likes, better than her dreams: size and heat and muscle; strength where she wants it; a little rough, a lot seductive, and simply the way he’s kissing her right now is winding her higher.  She pulls him in closer and knows that he’s only moving because he wants to; runs a hand down over his back and lower, brings it round to stroke and squeeze him, take the – substantial – measure of the man.  He gasps and she smiles darkly into the demanding kiss, takes her mouth away to move round his jaw, feels his hand loosen from the welcome pressure at her neck.

“Like that, Castle?”  She nips at his neck, flicks her tongue over the ridge in his ear, whispers wickedly.  “Lost for words?”  She moves her hand a little, flickers her fingers dirtily, hears his muted groan with dark delight, and does it again.  She’s surprised when he pulls her away from him, but then he pins her hands above her head with just one of his, and Beckett sinks into the dark, inviting sensations of a strength that can hold her in place, let her forget all her need to be in control, let her float free from the chains of her obligations to the dead and the living.  No need to think, no need to talk.  Just sensation and reaction and someone else to lead. 

“Oh no, Beckett.  You don’t get that yet.  You’re not ready.” And she’s just about to object because she is _so_ ready when he puts his mouth over the black silk covering her breasts and _sucks_ and any words she might have used disappear.  And then he does it again, and again, and she dissolves into pure sensation and the feeling of his mouth on her breast and she gives up any concept of fighting it because _fuck_ he is really, really good at this and he’s holding her hands above her head in just the way she likes and his other arm is heavy and firm across her waist to stop her from escaping the ravages of his lips and tongue and _oh don’t stop_.

“I think you like that, Beckett.”  _Oh yes_. She likes the feeling of now wet silk sliding over her hard nipples, punctuated by light teasing nips and the scrape of stubble through the delicate fabric, on her sensitive skin above the lace edge.  But he’s _talking_ , too, deep twilight reverberations echoing around her ribs, wicked words that twine between his actions.  Just that voice, the sensual predatory purr, the half-growl undertone; just that sable-furred voice could drive her to desperate distraction, to pleading.

And then he lets go of her hands and holds her hips in place as he moves downward and she’s panting and writhing even before he reaches her panties.

“Don’t you like that?  The way you’re moving, the way I have to hold you still” – and he takes considerable satisfaction when her hips buck at the words: _ah yes, Beckett, I thought so_ – “If this is how you react when I’m only just getting to know you” – oh, he’ll know every inch of her, body and brain and Biblically – “then just imagine how I’m going to make you feel when you’ve _told_ me what you like.”  His voice drops still lower, distilled desire sinking through the surface of her skin and seeping down to turn her muscles liquid and pool between her legs.  “You’ll need to answer _my_ questions, Beckett.  It’s _my_ turn to have you” – he pauses and the implications make her squirm – “in interrogation.  I think you’re a bad, bad girl, Beckett.”  He runs a finger over the damp silk and her hips twist again.  “So tell me, Beckett, do you like it when I touch you like this?”

When she refuses to reply he stops, waits, plays lightly, casually, with the silk vee plunge between her breasts.  She’ll answer.  He knows she wants more of what he’s doing.  He can see it in her face and her eyes and her wet lips and the soaked fabric over her nipples and between her legs. 

After a moment, she speaks, and her voice drains all the blood from his body into one single engorged area.  It’s the whisper of hot mistral winds rustling through silk hangings, promise and potential of midnight movement and dark liquid desire.  “What if I want you to answer _my_ questions?  To tell me what _you_ like?” and the satin seduction could waken a corpse.  “I could do bad things to you.  Don’t you want that, Castle?”  She runs her tongue lasciviously, moistly, around her lips, pointing her meaning.  He sucks in air.  “Don’t you like that thought, Castle?  Don’t you want me on my knees in front of you?”

How has she done this?  How has she turned the tables on him so fast?  He was supposed to be in charge here, and yet for all his brilliance with words, hers are burning through him till he can’t see anything but the vision.  He has to stop her talking.  He doesn’t care that it means he’s lost control.  He just has to stop her talking before he disgraces himself because he can see exactly how she would kneel and imagine how the hot dark cavern of her mouth would burn him and just _fuck_ what has she done to him?

He strikes for her smiling, teasing, wicked mouth and plunders it so she _stops talking_ and hauls her against him and holds her so she squirms and can’t escape the hard weight pressing into her and he pulls one long leg up around his waist so she’s opened and he can grind into her and _oh_ she’s still got her heels on but they feel so good.  And once he’s imprisoned her so tightly against him it’s she who’s beginning to lose control and he’s regained enough to glide firm fingers over her ass and under the black wisp of silk she’s pleased to call panties and he loosens the cage of his arms enough that he can roll her on to her back and slide her panties off and spread her legs and he’d _meant_ to use his lips and fingers to bring her to screaming but she’s so wet and he’s so hard and he just needs to be inside her all over again and filling her and possessing her in the most intimate primitive way because she’s _his_.  He’ll have time to play with her in other ways later. 

He rises up and over her and slams in, no finesse, no gentleness, not his usual care at all – and for the first time in this sweating heated dark night she begs him: _please more just like that_ and scratches sharp nails into his shoulders to pull him closer and then she starts to cry out and both of them break again together.

He rolls off, arm still under her neck, both panting, breathless; curls his hand up on to her shoulder, stroking lightly, side to side, skin to skin.  When she tries to move away from him he tightens his hand and stops her shifting over.

“Don’t move.  I like you there.”  ( _Let go, kitten. I don’t like cuddling._ )He props himself up on an elbow and looms over her, feeling the bite of the scrapes she’s left on his back.  Somewhere along the way she’s lost the heels.  She’s still a dark night’s wet dream without them.  He runs hungry eyes over her tangled hair, smudged eyes, swollen lips; the stubble burn above her bra.  He reaches around her back and undoes it as if he has the right, a casually possessive gesture, slips it off to palm each breast, gently soothing over the scrapes, the marks he’s made.

If she hadn’t been so thoroughly – fucked.  The word is _fucked_ , Kate – she’d be objecting to this careless assumption of ownership, assuming he’s got the right to keep her against him and strip her and touch her again, stroking gently, as if she’s a pet.  She’s no-one’s possession, nobody’s pet.  She doesn’t purr for anyone.  She’s been described as a wildcat, though, more than once, in the days when she still played the game, before… and after, when it became the very occasional, annual, route to oblivion, when nothing else was enough.  She tries to twist away from the hypnotic, relaxing strokes; finds she can’t; feels a little trickle of new desire run along her skin.  Just once, a little softness, a little gentle control, won’t hurt.  It’s only for one night: she shouldn’t have done this at all but since she has...  She relaxes into the warmth of a big hand, covering the whole of a small breast; the forearm under her neck; the other hand around her shoulder, large fingers tracing delicate small patterns, such a contrast to the rough grip of a few moments ago; the well-developed pectorals at her side; then she stretches lazily, eases down.  The slow stroking at breast and shoulder doesn’t drop a beat, though there’s a slight expansion of that broad chest on an indrawn breath.

Castle’s content merely to ensure that Beckett doesn’t go any place while they’re both coming down from that incredible high.  Somewhere in the endorphin waterfall, the idea that he should keep her close for a while has washed down and stuck in his mind.  He’s not inclined to dislodge it.  Uncovering Detective Beckett’s darker side, satisfying that and his own desires together, sweeps around his head.  He’ll enjoy discovering just what she likes, taming this clawing wildcat into sweet surrender in bed.  He’ll make her purr.  Starting now.  She’ll be his, for as long as he wants her, and he’s already decided that it’ll be for more than just a night, or even a few.

Buried in the dream-haze of afterglow, he doesn’t hear the tiny voice trying to tell him that he doesn’t do this; he doesn’t think like this; relationships are for other people.  He’s oblivious to the tip-tap of warnings that he’s not in control of this any more – already – that in truth he hasn’t been in control of anything about this since Detective _sex in motion_ Beckett arrested him at his own book party.  He wants her for a lot more than one night, is all he can think, and now that he’s taken her one way that she clearly likes, rough and fast and hard, he’s going to show her that he’s in control by more than just sheer size and strength; that he can use dark seductive words and long flexible fingers and pliant, deliberate mouth gently, inexorably, to wind her higher, bring her to sobbing submission against him.  She won’t know where he stops and she begins: all she’ll know is how squirmingly, frantically, addictively good he’ll make her feel.  Then she won’t leave him.  He still doesn’t hear the yammering warnings in the back of his brain, soundlessly howling that he hasn’t even qualified that statement; that he’s forgotten his safety mantra: _till I leave her_.


	9. Thinking about my own protection

And so he begins to explore, stretching the limits of his obsession.  The hand on her breast becomes a little less soothing, a little more teasing, moving from one side to the other till her nipples are tight peaks that he can oh-so-gently pinch and roll, watching her reactions flush her skin and dilate her pupils; seeing her lips part, her breathing deepen; twisting the knives of desire into her.  When she begins to move, gratifyingly soon, (he can do this.  He can.  He’ll regain control of this night) he slides a heavy thigh across her silky legs to keep her in place and grips her shoulder tighter and brings his mouth to her breasts as his fingers start to drift lower.  He can hear her heart thudding, sharp swift staccato beats as her breathing speeds up in matched metronomic pants; turning harsher, gasping; the soft undertones of renewed arousal beginning to thread through the weave of the fabric he’s wrapping her in, silk shackles to tie her to him.  He lets his hand move lower again, feels her try to shift under his leg, restricted, restrained; and when he glides gentle fingertips down through soft folds and finds her open and wet and ready she mews and whimpers and _oh_ this is what he wants: Beckett soft and open and compliant and purring and wholly receptive to everything he’s doing; wholly under his sexual spell: wholly _his._

Beckett stopped thinking, stopped caring, some time ago: soothed, sated, slightly sleepy; content, for once, to be cuddled and cosseted; simply to receive the soft strokes.  By the time she registers, through her post-sex haze, that Castle’s changed the game, she’s enjoying it too much to worry that this isn’t the hard, hot sex that feels so _good_ but won’t mean anything; this is a slow, deliberate, controlled seduction crafted to ensure she loses all control; left at the mercy of wicked hands and hot mouth and his desire: she shouldn’t give in like this but it’s just so good and she wants so badly just to yield and let him take complete charge; define her actions and reactions in all the ways she saw and felt and heard in her hot, edgy, arousing dreams.  He can do it for her, and she’s already forgotten why  - if she ever had a good reason – she wasn’t going to let him.

And once again he’s starting to talk; midnight whispers to trap her mind.

“What do you like, Beckett?  Shall I tell you what I think you like?”  His fingers dance against her.  “You like it rough, don’t you?  You like it hard and fast and pinning you to soaked sheets so you scream.”  He slips his fingers just inside and she tries to push further.  “But that’s not all, is it?  You like your hands… held, don’t you?”  A little deeper.  “Maybe more than just held.  Maybe more than just your hands.”  How’d he know that?  And she thinks of what that might mean and writhes a little.  A little deeper still.  “Oh yes, Beckett, I know what you like.  But now we’re going to try something I like.  Do you know what I like?  I like it when you scream my name.”  She gasps frantically for breath.  His fingers are sliding and curving and hitting just the right spot and _oh oh oh_ he brings her up to the edge again and stops.  And does it again.  And again.  And then she can’t help screaming his name and then he lets her shatter.

When the world comes back into focus Castle’s watching her carefully, assessingly.  It’s slightly unnerving.  But when he realises she’s noticed his look it’s swiftly hidden under a very masculine expression of satisfaction.  “You liked that,” he says smugly.  “I liked that, too.”  He reaches for her and tugs her across his chest, holding her tucked in between his shoulder and chin.  The gesture doesn’t entirely match his words and behaviour.  Sure, it’s still wholly possessive, but there’s an oddly protective undertone.  Oh no.  No, no.  That’s just a mistaken impression, fuelled by afterglow.  That’s got to be wrong.  This is a one-time deal, she knows that.  In which case, time for some payback.

She brings her hand across to scrape sharp nails over his nipple and senses the change in mood instantly.  When he doesn’t try to stop her she pinches, sharply, accepts the indrawn breath as only her due, glides a small hand southwards and simultaneously nips hard over his collarbone, laves with her tongue, swirls it round, feels the sudden tension in his jaw.  As her fingers skirt him to stroke the hard muscle in his thigh he gasps, his ribcage moving under her.  She’ll undo him, now, just like he undid her.  Turnabout is fair play, and now she’ll make him beg.  She wraps her fingers round him and slides over satiny skin, and when she’s satisfied with the results of that; listening to him groan deeply, she slips out his grasp and trails kisses downward.

He knew what she was going to do.  He just didn’t anticipate it being like this.  She’s so hot and so _dirty_ and _fuck_ she can’t do that to him except she does and _no_ she’s not going to shatter him like this because he will have to leave soon and he has to be inside her one more time and _fuck_ again she just cannot _do_ that to him so he pulls her away and pushes her on to her back and pins her hands above her head (because he knows how much she liked it) and starts to talk (because she likes that too and he likes knowing that simply talking dirty to her soaks her through and in her car that’ll be a good game to play) and rests over her just like in the gym.

“Do you like it like this?  Was this what you were imagining in the gym, when you were on your back underneath me?”

She arches against him and rubs where he’s pressed to her.  “Ye-ess.”  It’s dragged out of her on a gasp.

“Did you want me to do this?”  He slides a little way inside and stops, watching her through the haze of his own desire.  She’s so wet and open, so much more than he’d imagined when he wrote his feverish fantasies of Nikki Heat.  She pushes against him to try to take him deeper.

“Want more?”  Her nails pierce his hands at the taunting tone and he jerks in reaction and slips further in.  “You do.  Say you want it, Beckett.  Say you want me.”  She has to say it.  He needs her to say it even though her actions are telling him how much she wants him.  She has to say it because that way he can tell himself and almost believe that he’s still getting what he wants, still in control.  She tries to move herself, but the way he’s pressing her down with his bulk means that she can’t get what she wants without giving him what he wants.  He senses the instant when she gives up her own control again and lets him have the lead.

“Castle,” and it’s almost a moan.  “I want this.”  And he pushes fully into her tight, hot body because he can’t wait any more now she’s asked for it, and doesn’t notice in the hot blaze of completion that she hasn’t said she wants _him_.

He doesn’t want to go.  He wants to hold on to Beckett, keep her within his grip, make sure she doesn’t acquire any idea of leaving him.  But he needs to go, needs to be at home, and anyway there’s always tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that.  He’s shown her why she should be his, and judging by the way they’d both behaved, she isn’t objecting.  He’s got what he wanted, and now he’s going to keep it.

* * *

 

He doesn’t know what he’d expected when he turns up at the precinct the next morning, but the usual irritation wasn’t it.  It’s as if last night never happened, or meant nothing; as if she’d never moaned and begged and screamed for him; never made him rasp and groan for her.  Her gaze flicks across him and reveals nothing at all except annoyance that he’s back.  That’s not how this is supposed to go.  She’s supposed to want him, like she did yesterday, wild for him to do more, give her more, take her higher.  Because he certainly hasn’t finished with her.  He’s not ready for an ending; hasn’t in any way had his fill; hasn’t uncovered the other actions she likes, the games she might want to play.  She’s no vanilla innocent, and there were certain indications last night that there may, in due time, be more uses for service handcuffs than merely arresting criminals.  For her, though he thinks she likes him in control, he might even give up having control.  It – she – was that good.  He realises with a thud of disbelief that he hasn’t cured his obsession at all.  In fact, he just might have fed it.  _But it’s okay_ , he tells himself, he’s had these obsessions before and come through.  It won’t last.  Maybe a rather more extended affair than previously, but it still won’t last for very long.  Just as long as he wants it to.

Except Beckett isn’t giving him the slightest indication that she wants to do it again.  Not one.  She’s back to the thick layer of ice and reserve, over the spiky, tense, angry core; no hint of the clawing wildcat or the purring kitten he’d held curled against him and petted.

“No body’s dropped, Castle.  I didn’t call you.  Why are you here?”  That’s hardly encouraging.  Thin cold fear – of failure? - slips through him.  She’s supposed to want him.  ( _Bye, Ricky.  It’s over._ )  He’d made her scream for him.  She’s supposed to be his, now, for as long as he wants.

“I wanna see you tonight.”  She looks at him coolly, and shakes her head.

“I don’t think so.”  It’s implacable.

“What?” he ejaculates, rather too loudly for discretion.  Fortunately there’s no-one nearby in the bullpen.  “But…”

“Scratched an itch, Castle.  That’s all.”  The sheer vulgarity contrasted with the quiet statement and cold, educated voice slams into him.  It’s wholly uncharacteristic: even when she banters in the bullpen she doesn’t display crudity like that.  She’s looking at him slightly oddly, eyes shrouded and completely wrapped in unreadable reserve.  Even her voice doesn’t give anything away.  “C’mon.  We both know that’s all it was.  One-night stand, get it out the system.  ‘S what you wanted.  Didn’t mean anything.”  She’s already turned away, back to her desk and the pile of paperwork.  No.  No no _no no!_   It’s not what he wanted.  This is _not_ how this goes.  She doesn’t get to use him for one night and then walk away.  He’s not finished with her.  It’s the best sex he’s ever had in his life and he is not letting her push him away without a fight.  She can’t just write it off as if her reactions to him were nothing.  It’s not nothing.  He can’t believe it meant nothing to her.  It didn’t mean nothing to him.  It crashes over him that it wasn’t just sex, wasn’t just her body.  He does want her body, and also her mind, and her passion for justice, and more.  And she doesn’t know it and she probably won’t believe it and anyway she doesn’t care.  She only wanted to _scratch an itch_. 

He’s had exactly what he initially thought he wanted and now he’s found that it isn’t what he actually wanted at all.  He’s not cured his obsession in the slightest, and he still hasn’t managed to capture Beckett.

Beckett is congratulating herself on her perfect concealment of every last iota of her feelings.  She won’t admit, to herself or anyone else, that last night meant anything at all to her.  It was a one-off mistake, and maybe now he’ll stop following her around and stripping her naked with those bad-boy bedroom eyes.  If she just ignores it, it – and he – will soon go away.  Good.

It was nice but now it’s done, and she can’t afford to get involved, especially with someone she doesn’t even like.  She’s perfectly well aware that he was only chasing so hard because she wouldn’t give in, so since she had conceded, there’s no point expecting it to carry on.  And she’s angry that she did give in.  She hadn’t been intending to.  She hates him more for the searing touch and blazing kisses and her own weakness in surrendering to what her body wanted.  It would only end soon.  Even if the sex was exactly what she wanted.  Wants.  It was a lot better than _nice_.  It was spectacular.  But it was a one-time deal.  She shouldn’t have done it at all.  That’s not who she is now.  She doesn’t dabble in the dark side any more.

Anyway, if she doesn’t do it again he’ll soon stop interfering in her well-organised world.  Rich playboys who get everything they want, any time they want it, are not an improvement to the precinct, nor are they a welcome addition to her life.  She concentrates on her paperwork and hiding her thoughts behind a perfect poker face, and consequently misses Castle’s utterly shocked, raw expression at her words.

Castle goes to the break room to collect himself and absent-mindedly gets a coffee from the machine.  He realises his mistake as soon as he tastes it.  It is, still, possibly the single most horrible drink that has ever passed his lips, including some unidentified mixtures at college which could quite possibly have contained hemlock and anti-freeze in equal quantities were it not that he still seems to be alive.  (He must be alive.  You don’t get this hurt when you’re dead.)  He doesn’t understand how any of the detectives can drink this stuff, and pondering this trivia at least partially takes his mind off the twisting pain in his chest, every time he re-hears Beckett’s words, which right now are on a continuous repeat loop.

He dumps the liquid – it’s not coffee; maybe it’s brake fluid – down the sink and trudges out, waves a generic goodbye and trudges home.  No-one notices he’s gone, no-one notices that he’s home.  He shuts himself in his study and mopes, once again the little lost new boy who’s got no friends.  ( _Mommy, do we have to move again?_ )  Except this time it’s worse, because he thought he’d got something better than friends.  But still.  There’s always Ryan and Esposito: he’s getting along well with them, even if they don’t always appreciate his suggestions at least they’re always honest with him. 

But he wants Beckett.  Detective _I-was-just-scratching-an-itch_ Beckett.  Like hell she was.  He doesn’t believe that for a moment.  There has to be a way to make her admit that.  He’ll get back to being in control of this game.  He’s not finished with Detective Beckett yet.    She’ll be his, for just as long as he likes.  Following her around just isn’t enough.  He tries to call her, gets only voicemail, waits a while, tries again, waits a little longer, tries a third time; when it’s still not answered, gives up, unconsoled.  Deep in the darkest corners of his mind, obsession stretches its talons a little further out, and starts to gather in all the facts and impressions and oddities that he’s noticed about Detective Beckett.  He’d thought he didn’t care about them, didn’t need to explore her depths.  But the back of his brain has other, more dangerous, ideas; wriggling maggot-like, hidden beneath the surface. 

Why should he care, anyway?  Why can’t he just let her go, reduce it to a one-night stand that need not be repeated and doesn’t matter?  Surely she’s just another woman?  He’s been with hot women before: not for a while, though he’s squired enough around the town to maintain the image, but still… Why should it matter?  Because, he thinks slowly, because she’s trying to leave him.  He doesn’t like being left.  He does the leaving.  He’s in control of his life.  He won’t be abandoned.  No-one abandons him, leaves him.  Not now.  Not any more.  ( _Bye, Ricky.  Bye, Rick._ )  Being left scares him; reminds him of the days he’s left behind, his failures (his marriages: even though he left them, they’re still failures; but he doesn’t think about that); makes him think that he’s not the star-spangled success the world believes him to be; not the confident Rick Castle that everybody loves.  And if he’s not that Rick Castle, then is he anything?  If people don’t like him, love him, give him what he wants – who is he?  Because everybody loves the man they think he is.

Everybody except the team at the Twelfth.  They don’t care about who his publicist says he is, who page six says he is, who his sales events say he is.  If he tried to use that on them, they’d laugh him out of town.  Maybe, just maybe, with them he can find out if there’s more to him than playboy Rick Castle, once he’s beyond his own front door.

But introspection shifts to anger.  She’s _not_ going to leave him. Nobody leaves him.  He’s _Rick Castle_ and nobody leaves his parties till he wants them to.

And he knows just how to make sure she doesn’t.  Because the more he thinks about hot Detective Beckett (and surely he should learn her given name if he’s spent the night with her?) all last night and cold Detective Beckett all this morning and the complete disconnect between the two; the more he knows she’s hiding something from him.  Or from herself.  He’s found one key to the multiple locks on her personality and private life.  Now to find some more.   He considers Beckett, draws the picture of her sitting at her pristine, precinct desk with the skilled precision of a miniaturist: screen, phone, pile of paperwork – ah.  Stack of paper cups.  Beckett mainlines that pisspoor excuse for coffee that the precinct machine provides.  He can solve that, and an extremely pleasant by-product will be that he’ll have something decent to drink as well.  Key two, meet Lock B.  Open Sesame.  And preferably, hopefully, open Beckett.  Yes.  Timeout over.  Game on, again.  He’s forgotten all his earlier misery and introspection now that he’s got a plan.  He doesn’t need to try to see her again tonight. (though that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t like to)  He’ll let her stew.  Let her remember what he did to her.  Remember how much she’d liked it.  She’ll come running back, when he wants her.  All he’ll need to do is touch her.  He’ll just research coffee machines, and then write.  Ideas for Nikki Heat are sparking in his mind.  Publishable… and not.  He opens his laptop and begins.

* * *

In her own apartment, Beckett is considering her phone.  Three missed calls, all from the same number.  Castle’s.  What’s that all about?  He’d wanted, and got, a one-night stand.  He’s not in it for the long haul, and she’s not up for being a short, meaningless fling.  She shouldn’t have let him kiss her; she doesn’t do one-night stands, delicious edge of danger wrapping round her or not.  No voicemails or texts, though.  Whatever it was he wanted, no doubt some question on precinct procedure, it wasn’t important enough to leave a message.  He can ask tomorrow.  If he bothers showing up.  She’s not sure why he bothered today: it was only paperwork and now he’s had what he wants she’s sure he’ll only turn up on live cases.  She can go right back to her nice, peaceable, controlled, civilised life.  _Your boring, single, lonely life_ , says Lanie’s sharp New York twang in her mind.  Lanie would love this story, if she ever knew it.  Lanie spends all her time telling Beckett to get a life.  Lanie’s spent the last three and a half weeks telling Beckett to have some fun with Castle, as a way of getting a life.  Lanie, in fact, has been almost as much of a pain in the ass as Castle, and her ostensibly rather purer motives are not improving Beckett’s view of her advice.

She stretches, slowly, feeling the twinges of last night’s… activities… still present.  A hot bath will cure that; some wine will relax her, and a quiet night with a good book will return her to normal.  No more frantic, fabulous sex, no chance of indulging her darker desires with bad boys.  With one very particular, very talented, bad boy.  She really ought to have grown out of that by now.  And yet… it had been so _good_.  She starts to draw her bath and tries not to think about the midnight memory of his touch; the way he’d taken charge; the edge of danger, of all the forbidden actions that might now be possible.  It doesn’t work, and alone in her bath, sipping her wine, she can still feel the delicious friction of that scruffy, sexy stubble against her skin; the way he’d touched her, perfectly pushing all her buttons; the feel of him inside her.  She slips down further into the hot water and allows the memory to envelop her.  Much later, despite the wine and the book, her dreams blaze, and her morning shower is necessarily cool. It irritates her immensely.


	10. What's the story?

Castle, having been thoroughly distracted by an idea for his next chapter and consequently having written for half the night, is not wholly focused the next day.  In fact, he’s gone to the precinct because he feels comfortable there.  He’s not supposed to be there.  He’s _supposed_ to be available, because his book’s gone on general release today, but he’s scared.  Scared of the critics, scared what they’ll say, scared that with every book he puts a little of himself out there and what if the public sees through him, sees through the public personality that everyone loves, what if the critics crack his shell like a lobster and pull out the insecurity within?  ( _You’re not my friend, Ricky Rodgers.  I don’t like you._ )  What if they don’t like him any more?  What then?  But already, being at the precinct gives him something that isn’t connected to his books, or the public personality, and, though he doesn’t let himself know it, he finds it very reassuring.  When he screwed up, he was raked down for it – but that was the end of it.  It’s never been referred to again.  Not like his supposed playboy reputation and his failed marriages, dragged up and smeared across the tabloids every time he turns around.

Inspiration had struck before he’d done much about coffee, and he’d forgotten his plans until he makes the mistake of drinking some more of it.  While he’s still making faces into the cup and describing the awfulness of the taste, Detective _suddenly-far-too-perceptive_ Beckett pulls the same trick on him that he had on her and tells him exactly why he’s sitting there, displaying a substantial degree of more than slightly malicious pleasure at the insight.  He tries to cover up, but he doesn’t think that it works.  And then her phone rings and they’ve got a case and – well, just phew.  He doesn’t like her digging into his feelings.  She might find out that he isn’t… something. _That’s articulate, Rick.  Thought you were a writer?_   He tries to shove that thought away.  He’s enough for her.  He has to be enough to keep her for as long as he wants her.  And he’d been plenty enough for her the other night.  He thinks idly that it’s time to repeat that, and then a great deal less idly about how to achieve it.  Starting with coffee.

While he’s in the car, instead of annoying Beckett by playing with all the tempting controls, he researches coffee machines instead, and when they’ve finished the day’s work (it’s clear that Beckett despises politics, and he’s deeply relieved – though he doesn’t admit that to himself, either – to find that it’s not just he whom she instantly detests) he starts to make some calls.  He knows what’s required – it’ll need to be hard-wearing, though, because the precinct as a whole mainlines coffee.  Beckett, in fact, is just the most extreme example of the species.  It’s another facet of her overdriven personality, he thinks.  Obsessed with murder, with justice, addicted to coffee.  She doesn’t seem to have a speed between dead stop and full on; no rheostat to dial it back.  She’d been the same in bed.  Maybe that’s why, he muses, she wants someone else in control.  So that said other someone – he – can slow her down, defuse the primed bomb of Beckett’s obsessions and anger, keep her from exploding.  Maybe she can’t do that for herself.  He could.  Oh yes.  So many ways to keep her on the edge, to defer gratification.

He steers away from that intensely erotic thought.  For now.  Her car is not the place to start his campaign.  He remembers with slight annoyance that she’s already snapped at him that the only reason she didn’t kill him already for messing with the radio is because it would be recorded.  He thinks even more irritatedly that if that includes sound then he’d better forget any plan of talking dirty in the car.  Being arrested isn’t in the game plan.  It’s not he whom he wants to see in handcuffs. He cuts off that line of thought pretty fast, too.  But he makes a little mental memo to investigate the recording specs of NYPD unmarked cars and cruisers.  He’ll need it, sometime, so it’s only research.

He goes back to coffee machine specifications.  And if he’s thinking that providing them with good coffee will wheedle him into everyone’s – Beckett’s – affections faster, just like candy, and later illicit beer, used to do at each new school, at least those times when there was money for luxuries, well, he isn’t letting that piece of forgotten history hit his conscious mind.  ( _Wanna be my friend?  I got candy._ )  It’s just that he’s sick of bad coffee.  He’s Rick Castle, and he doesn’t have to put up with anything he doesn’t like.  And since he has no intention of walking away from this new, interesting occupation of catching killers and being at the precinct, or this new, interesting occupation of actually chasing a woman, he’ll simply ensure that the coffee matches his requirements.  There’s no question that the woman does.

He finds a suitable machine and the minute he manages to get away from Beckett by pleading a restroom break (she rolls her eyes and tells him that cop work requires bladder control – it’s the first time she’s snarked at him like she does with the boys, and he doesn’t think she even noticed) he applies pleasant but authoritative words and not a small amount of money and arranges for the machine, and a tech to fit it, to arrive at the Twelfth on Monday, as early as possible.

* * *

 

Never mind half the bullpen, half the precinct’s come to sample the wares from the new machine.  Beckett is appalled by the noise and chaos and disruption that her annoying writer causes – hold on.  _Her_ annoying writer?   He’s not hers.  Not at all.  Just like she’s not his Detective.  She’s got nothing to do with him.  It wasn’t her idea to have him here and life would just be so much easier if he left.  He’s almost entirely devoid of redeeming features.  _You just keep tellin’ yourself that, girl_ , says Lanie’s irritating voice in her head. _Maybe you’ll even convince yourself._  

She’s not going to be bribed with coffee, even if Ryan and Esposito are already bought.  She defiantly continues with the revolting – but caffeinated – liquid that she’s used to, and resolutely ignores Castle’s knowing smirk.  She can’t imagine why he’s still showing up.  She’d have thought he’d be bored by now.  He’s seen her naked, so why’s he still looking her over with his intent, undressing gaze?  He’s a playboy, and he had his fun, and she really wishes that he would stop looking at her with eyes that say _let’s do it again_.  _Now._   Because each time she sees that look, her good resolutions take another hit and the memories send heat down her spine and liquid to her core and she remembers very clearly how she used to be a bad, bad girl, running with the bad, bad boys. 

Then, suddenly, in the quiet of the late evening empty bullpen, staring at her desk and the murder board and thinking about the case, she remembers that odd, unnerving look, and the strange hint of protectiveness, and that he’d made it clear he wanted to see her again.  And he’s still making that clear, and it (he) had been so very, very good.  That’s one redeeming feature.  The boys like him, and they’re not easy to impress; used to sussing out lies, evasions and insincerity.  In fact, they seem to approve of him, and it’s not just the bribe of good coffee.  Two redeeming features. (can’t count one for each of Ryan and Espo, they come as a pair)  Montgomery likes him.  That’s… very interesting.  She respects Montgomery’s judgement of people more than anyone else in her life; even more than her own.  Montgomery doesn’t give respect easily, and when he does it’s always justified.  Hmm.  _That_ implies that, smug irritatingness aside, there might be a character lurking behind the playboy.  And if there’s character, then just possibly she might be able to trust him.  A third redeeming feature.  She tries not to let the claws of her desire, which have only been sharpened by that hot, dark night, make her decision for her.

Finally, as important as the rest, Lanie might be right.  She’s not had any fun – the dinner and subsequent events aside – for a long time.  She knows she’s too serious, never putting the job aside, no longer able to switch off.  When she isn’t dreaming those hot, edgy dreams, now, she sees their faces – not the victims, but the grieving families and friends.  It’s a bad sign, the first step towards burnout.  She needs to deal with that: needs to find a way to bring herself back, step away from the case at the end of the day.  But.  But she doesn’t do casual.  If she goes in for this, then the inevitable ending _will_ hurt, however irritating he is, however much she tells herself it’s just physical relief.  She doesn’t see an answer to that.

She’s alone, and there’s no-one to see if she succumbs to the temptation of strong, hot coffee.  Maybe caffeine will help her think: help her find a way through.   Because she wants him.  Really wants him.  But she can’t stand the idea that he’d still be following her round for _research_ after it all falls apart.  Keeping your feelings under wraps is fine if the cause of those feelings isn’t there.  It’s a bit more tricky if it’s right by your desk.  He annoys her enough without adding hurt to the mix.  But.  But she knows what she likes and he was _exactly_ what she likes.  And if she can trust him – and she trusts the judgement of Espo, and Montgomery, and Ryan – then she’ll be able to go further down the route of what she likes.  She’s pretty sure that he’d like it too.

She checks surreptitiously around her and, satisfied that no-one will see her concession, takes a cup from the break room and rapidly presses the correct combination of buttons.  Just the enticing aroma, redolent of twilight evenings in small booths and intimate circumstances, starts to clear her mind.  Maybe… maybe it could work.  Okay, it’s never going to be some long-term affair, but if the boys and Montgomery and Lanie all think that there’s something more than just the spoilt rich playboy then it’s not likely to turn nasty: not in the way that Sorenson had.  It’s not like there’s a clash of careers here.  As long as he leaves her past alone, stays in the present, it’ll be fine. 

She’s lost in her reverie, standing over the filling cup, when an unexpected voice startles her and the coffee spills and she only just avoids a nasty scald.  It is, of course, Castle.  He’s had an idea.  At nearly ten o’clock, he’s had an idea and he’s come to the precinct because – of course – he thinks he’ll find her here.  And, worse, he’s right.  Okay.  That is _it_.  That is absolutely _enough_.  If even some short-stay irritating far-too-sexy Writer-Boy can work out that she spends her entire life in the precinct and never really goes home it’s time to do something about it.  She can’t afford to burn out.  Homicide is her life, but she has to be able to do the job.   

She knows she’s close to letting her body make her decision, not her mind, and suddenly she doesn’t care.  It’s been so long, and she wants this so much.  Not him.  This.  If she gets hurt, she gets hurt.  (she ignores that she will.  She can try, but she knows she won’t be casual.  She doesn’t remember how.)

First, though – the idea.  The dead demand so much more than the living.  She tamps down the hot thrill of desire, fired not by her dreams, now, but by memory, reality; and starts to work with this idea of Castle’s.  It’s very plausible.  She challenges and questions and tries to tear it down, but the more they argue about it the more it fits the evidence.  An hour flashes past, and at the end of it she has a list of matters to start the boys on in the morning.  She realises, rather unexpectedly, that this has been fun, as well as useful.  She’d thought he might be intelligent, back at the beginning.  Now she’s sure of it.  He might even be as clever as she.  She likes matching wits; the cut and thrust (oh Kate, what a choice of language) of debate; sketching out a theory and then building the structure on evidence.  His insane theories spark her thinking: her thinking fires him to tell the story – and somehow, it all arc-welds together into one coherent complete solution.  And then there’s the other solution, body and brains, beautifully wrapped in that bad-boy, dangerous package, sending midnight thrills down her spine.

Castle also has some thoughts of his own.  He’d had his brilliant inspiration – with a little help from his daughter – and the idea that he should find Beckett and tell her about it, make her _see_ his usefulness, had arrived only seconds behind.  Key three, in fact, meeting Lock C.  Being her obsession with murder.  Solving homicides, to be precise.  And then there’s the _other_ reason for coming.  He’s already decided he doesn’t like her trying to leave him.  It’s not what he wants.  And now he’s _almost_ sure it’s not what she wants.

He’d been sure she’d be at the precinct.  A little light conversation with Ryan, who’s slightly more naive and much less close-mouthed than Esposito, has given him what has now proven to be the perfectly correct idea that Beckett basically lives at the precinct.  Apparently she goes home to shower, to change, and to sleep.  Most of the time, anyway.  It’s time she went home for something else, too.  Something a little more… sociable.

An...nd – she’s utilising his coffee machine.  _Ha_.  So much for her principled refusal of its wares earlier.  He watches silently from the dark shadows around the bullpen, running over his plan.  Offer up an idea, discuss it for a while, appreciate that razor-sharp mind.  Then it’ll be late.  Escort her home – and kiss her goodnight, with that edge of bad-boy dominance that she’d liked so much.  Appreciate certain other of her assets.  Let’s see where that takes them.  He thinks it’s only too likely to take them back to her bed. 

But if it doesn’t then he’ll… well.  He won’t force her to acknowledge her attraction.  He’s not that man.  He’s seen those men.  Casting couches and backstage “favours” and insincere flattery and using power to get what they want.  Whether or not the recipient wants it.  ( _You want the role?  Better be nice to me._ )  He’s seen the tears, after, through the night.  He will never, _ever_ be one of those men.  He might always get what he wants, but the other person has always, always wanted it too.  Always.

But he might… woo her.  See if that works.  It would be… interesting.  Not boring.  It’s peculiar.  He thought, no more than three days ago, that _trying_ was an unfair imposition on him.  Now he thinks it might be a great deal more interesting – and fun – than it being easy.  And even if they do fall back into bed tonight – which is absolutely the most desirable outcome – then he wants to know more about her bedroom likes and dislikes.  Which will definitely take effort.  And time.  Lots of time.  With her.  And discovering Beckett – in bed – will be very interesting.  Fascinating.  It occurs to him that the last month or so might just have taught him that things that take effort – like solving murders – are quite often _interesting_ ; even if the work along the way might be boring.  In fact – hmm – he hasn’t been bored since he began here.  He’d come here to catch Detective Beckett, and alongside that he’s found that he likes catching killers, too.

But thinking of bed, if they get there – always assuming that she doesn’t shoot him now, though he hopes that she won’t – this time he’ll make absolutely certain that there’s no more trying to leave him.  He’ll make sure he gives her anything she wants, any way she wants it.  Happily, that seems very likely to coincide precisely with the way he wants it.  He likes control, and he thinks she likes giving up control.  How very convenient, he thinks, he’ll get just what he wants, because that’s what she’ll want.  He always gets what he wants, in the end.

He speaks.  And has to suppress first a smile at how she startles and then the desire to make sure she isn’t hurt, because he’s sure that she won’t welcome concern from him.  Not that that’s uppermost in his mind.  Oh no.  Concern is a long way from his primary emotion, right now.  Smug satisfaction that she’s sneakily using _his_ coffee machine, oh yes.  Desire, definitely.  Concern – not required.  He carefully ignores the way in which he’d held her in,  needed to bring her into him, after he’d made her scream and shatter; ignores his fascination with her pain and off-key reactions and the increasing need to find out why.  He wants her.  That’s what, that’s all, he wants.  Her story doesn’t matter.  It really doesn’t.

And then he forgets everything apart from arguing out the evidence and the theories and stretching his own mind to keep up with Beckett.  Boy, does he have to stretch.  She really is as intelligent as he is.  No-one’s made his mind work this hard for a long time.  No-one’s made other things this hard for a long time, either.  Exchanging theories with Beckett is nearly as good as sex with Beckett, and much more publicly acceptable.  He flicks a glance at his watch and realises that over an hour has passed without him noticing, but now they’re done for the night.  Well, _this_ is done.

“It’s late, Beckett.  Time to go home.”

She looks slightly uncertain, as if she isn’t sure she’s finished work, as if there’s more she should be looking for, running down, searching out: just doing more.

“C’mon.  I’ll take you home.”  That fetched her, though not in the way he’d hoped.  The spark and sparkle of moments ago is replaced by irritation.

Despite her decisions about _getting a life_ , Beckett is not impressed at all by Castle telling her he’ll take her home.  If he’d _asked_ , now, she might not have been at all averse to the idea.  But she won’t be told, as if she’s a child, or weak, or a putative victim.  She’s a cop, and she can protect herself.

“Not required.”  The implication is _and not wanted._

“Don’t care, I’m going to.”  He’s taking a chance, forcing just a little.  He shrugs off his usual variety of seductive, hint-of-twilight charm and lets the edge of danger slip out in a harder tone, intending to play on her reactions to him taking charge in bed.  “I’m not taking no for an answer, Beckett.”  She looks at him with disbelief, anger, and no desire at all. 

“I’m the cop, not you.  I have a gun.  You don’t.”  He slowly raises one wolfish eyebrow and she blushes fiercely, but continues.  “I’m perfectly able to defend myself.  I do this all the time.  I don’t need your help.  The answer is _no_.”

Castle abruptly realises how she’s thinking.  Ah.  This is not his private novel, and this is not his toy Detective Heat.  Possibly accidentally impugning Beckett’s ability to take care of herself was not the best way to introduce the subject of escorting her home.  It hadn’t exactly been easy to win, when sparring, and he’s really a lot bigger than she is.  And, of course, she hadn’t had her gun with her.  Fortunately.  He backtracks, rapidly.

“Okay, I didn’t mean that the way it came out.  My dear Detective Beckett,” he says in a smooth, inviting tone, sweeping her a rakish, theatrical bow, “may I please have the pleasure and protection of your company on my way home?”  Beckett looks extremely dubiously at him, rolls her eyes, but appears to have lost the worst of her annoyance.

If he’d started with that line, she’d have been a lot happier.  Still, he seems to have realised his mistake.  She smooths her hackles back down.  Marginally.  She’s rapidly revising her previous plans for the rest of the evening.  She’s not sure that this will be a good idea any more.  “No,” she says, very firmly, with an edge of _you have got to be joking_.  If he’s going to try the other approach, this will rapidly become nasty, brutish and short.  Very short.  Non-existent, in fact.  She’s not looking for a protector, in any sense of the word.  It’s about getting a life, taking down time from the dead, not burning out.  No need for anything else.  Maybe if there’s nothing else she won’t get hurt.  Maybe she’ll just go home and think this over on her own, out of this suddenly intense atmosphere, where desire is starting to bleed through her veins and into her mind, pushing against her annoyance and her sense.

It’s not acceptance, and Castle’s hopes sink.  Along with other areas.  He realises that he needs to take a little – actually, quite a lot - more care.  Detective _I have a gun and I’m not afraid to use it_ Beckett is not in need of the usual brand of flirtatious courtesy and consequent implications that (he preens) a large, strong, handsome male presence at her side is a useful form of protection.  Whatever she might like in bed.  Umm.  He likes being very obviously an – the – alpha male, showing off his ability to attract and take care of the most beautiful women, to be the life and soul of the party, to have important people wanting to be friends.  (The word _peacocking_ flits through his mind and is not allowed to remain there.  He’s the leader of the pack, just like he wanted to be.  Just like he wasn’t, as the permanent new boy.  He’ll never be treated as if he’s nothing again.)

When he looks up from his thoughts she’s gone.  She didn’t even bother to bid him farewell.  All that theorising, the swift give and take of suggestion and challenge, all the usefulness he’s just displayed, all the connection between them – and she walked off without even saying goodnight.  Walked out on him.  He’s infuriated, all over again.  He didn’t even get the chance to try to change her mind. 

He goes home, seething, and is not at all comforted by his suspicion that she left so she wouldn’t be tempted.  She ought to be tempted.  More than tempted.  What does he have to do to have her again?


	11. Don't you want me?

Not for the first time, none-too-suppressed sexual frustration has left Castle edgy, angry and unsatisfied.  He’d been so sure he’d get what he wanted.  And then he remembers that he’s got a reading tomorrow evening, and then remembers that she’s a fan (he’s sure of it) and decides, still so very hurt and angry, on some reverse psychology.  He’ll specifically tell her she’s not welcome.  Given how downright contrary she is, that should work perfectly.  And he’ll enjoy seeing her face when he doesn’t invite her, too.  She’s hurt him (but she shouldn’t have been able to) and now he’ll turn the tables.  She’ll know how it feels to be left behind, alone.  Serve her right, he thinks nastily and childishly, as he falls into sleep.  Serve her right.

The next day, he’s some way calmer and not a little ashamed of himself.  He’s never been deliberately, calculatedly nasty in the way he was considering and he is not going to start now.  He’s a better man than that.  Equally pertinently, if he acts as he had intended it will backfire, badly.  Beckett’s pride might very well prevent her turning up somewhere she thinks she’s clearly unwanted.  (Though he wants her there, to show her how good a writer he is, how many fans he has.  Back to trying to show her that everyone wants him, and so should she.)  She isn’t turning up where she’s clearly wanted, either, which is in his bed.  He thinks, Machiavelli-like, that he needs to refine his thinking, and planning, more than a little.  Ah, that’s it.  Let her know that the reading’s happening, subtly; imply that she wouldn’t be interested; make it clear that he doesn’t expect her to turn up.  Time for some acting.  Hide the anger, hide the frustration, hide the hurt; bring out don’t-care playboy Rick Castle.  If nothing else, it’ll irritate the hell out of her, and at least then she’ll be paying him some attention.  But when he next has her – and he _will,_ he’s determined upon it – there will be consequences.  No-one abandons him, leaves him standing on his own.

* * *

 

Beckett’s still carrying a whole new level of irritation with Castle when she hits the precinct in the morning.  Her dreams had left her unfulfilled and unrefreshed, and she’d not been inclined to resort to self-help just to deal with the fall-out from a night she shouldn’t have indulged in.  It’s the same as it used to be.  Give up control, give in, in bed, and suddenly you’re some pathetic little woman in need of protection in all the rest of your life.  _The hell with that_ , she thinks bitterly, disappointment fuelling anger.  Said anger is not at all assuaged by the memory, or by her unsatisfying dreams, or by the atrocious precinct coffee that she’s martyring herself by drinking because there is _no way_ that she’ll allow him the slightest hint that anything at all about him is in any degree acceptable or likeable.  Regardless of how her body reacted to him, regardless of the mental connection the other night, regardless of how hot and wet and frustrated and angry he makes her.  It’s all reverted to the initial poisonous cocktail of raw desire, only barely covered by sheer dislike.

Deep inside, her own desires and needs delicately draw down claws in her lower body, clenching her muscles and twisting her nerves.  She’s fighting her own wants, as much as she’s fighting Castle’s unconcealed heat.  She’d been a bad girl, once, in that other country of the past; mixing it with the bad boys who hadn’t thought she needed any protection or control in any way at all, outside a bedroom.  If she didn’t need it then, she surely doesn’t need it now: NYPD cop, trained in self-defence, gun on her hip.  She doesn’t need anyone to _take care_ – her mouth twists unpleasantly – of her.  She doesn’t want it, either.  It’s just a form of control that she doesn’t need and won’t accept.

She diverts all her rage and frustration, fuelled by the caffeine in the appalling coffee, to the case.  That way she’s firmly in control of every aspect of her life.  It’s just as well she hadn’t acted on her carnal impulses last night.  It would only have compounded the original mistake.

Unseen and unacknowledged, a thought entwines itself parasitically around the repressed desire that she’s consciously locking away: that ten years of not allowing anyone to take care of her in any way has led her to a point where she’s at her desk every Saturday night, on duty every holiday, and almost entirely devoid of friends and life.

* * *

 

Case closed, wife arrested; wannabe politician and actual murderer off the streets (two birds, one stone, Beckett thinks); even if she does have to give Writer-Boy some credit, that result makes it a good day.  Until she hears Castle inviting the boys to some reading of the final episode of Storm that he’s giving tonight.  He doesn’t ask her, she notices, and ignores the small pang that causes.  The boys are suitably derisive, which is hugely satisfying even if it doesn’t shift Castle’s happy smile one jot.  It’s perfectly satisfactory, and she’s not at all upset that he hasn’t asked her, she’s not disappointed at all.  And then Ryan opens his big fat Irish mouth and blows it all to hell.

“Hey man, why don’t you ask Beckett?  She reads your books.”

“I’m sure she’s got other things to do,” Castle says blandly.  “Cases to solve, killers to catch.  She wouldn’t be interested.  Not Beckett’s scene at all.  It’s going to be packed with fans and publishing types.    It’s open to anyone, so everyone with any literary taste at all will come.”  He smiles smugly.  “There’s always a huge turnout at these things.  When it’s me reading, anyway.”  The boys splutter.

“You’re so full of shit, bro.  Serve you right if we turned up and heckled.”

Castle grins, unbothered.  “Go ahead.  But don’t blame me when you’re body-slammed by a hundred crazed fans and turned into pate.”

He hasn’t missed Beckett’s slight rigidity; her sudden focus on her paperwork.  _Gotcha, Beckett_.  He continues within his public persona, the smooth, humorous sociability, joshing with the boys.  But somehow it doesn’t feel as forced, as fake, as when he usually needs the shell: he knows that they don’t believe him and he really doesn’t care, because  - how _odd_ – they’re friendly.  They’re not trying to get one over on him, not trying to climb over him to get ahead, not trying to oh-so-subtly put him down.  And – how odd, again – it’s comfortable, real, sincere.  His joshing isn’t needed to cover up anything: he can just be himself.  Whoever that is.

But in the meantime, Beckett is very obviously pretending to ignore the whole conversation.  He thinks his plan’s worked, and continues his exchange of compliments with Ryan and Esposito for the remainder of the day, until he leaves with a brief farewell and the promise that he’ll tell them all about it.  They make disgusted faces, and tell him not to bother if he doesn’t want to be their next case.

* * *

 

Beckett leaves very shortly thereafter, telling herself that she’s going home.  Which indeed she does, and prowls restlessly around, movement in no way dissipating what she tells herself is the ridiculous desire to go to this reading.  She should have stayed in the precinct and thumped hell out the punchbag, but she hasn’t been into the gym since she’d sparred with Castle and lost.  And it’s not because going there triggers the memories of him lying over her, large, heavy and aroused.  Not at all.  Gradually, her mind constructs a perfect justification for why she should attend the reading; which gives her an excuse to turn up while still convincing herself that it’s another way to drive him out the precinct, away from her.  She’s going to turn the tables on him.  She’s going to distract and disrupt his work. (work?  What work?  He never seems to do any work.  All he does is drink coffee and make unhelpful comments and undress her with his gaze.)  She’s going to carp and criticise and interfere and annoy.  See how he likes it.  And to do it right, she needs to be… eye-catching; to stop him cold and remind him of everything he had, and isn’t getting.

She selects a dress whose main virtues are its unignorable, traffic-stopping colour and the shortness of its skirt; reviews her hair and make-up and adjusts both appropriately to achieve her aim; finds a pair of complementary heels.  Her gun and badge are in her purse.  She’s both armed and dangerous.

Her tactics initially seem to gain her precisely the result she wants.  There’s an audible stutter.  But then it’s unfortunately followed by an unwelcome, slow perusal and a flash of considerable, smugly self-satisfied pleasure.  Beckett realises, far too late for it to do any good, that Castle’s played her perfectly again.  Under a well-practised, wholly unimpressed expression, she’s furious with both herself and him.  When he finishes, she barely bothers to raise her hands to applaud, and the few claps she does give only imply complete contempt.  She certainly won’t admit that he reads well, and that the voice has had its inevitable effect on her.  It only makes her angrier to know that his sable tones stroke deep into her and leave certain muscles twitching. 

Castle bounces up to her, clearly high on performing, adrenaline and applause.  She channels the literary critics of the New York Times and disparages everything she can think of.  He almost looks hurt.  So she points out unkindly, and not entirely truthfully, that that’s how he behaves to her in the precinct and, thoroughly satisfied that she’s made her point, decides it’s time to leave.

Which is when, through some appalling twist of unkind fate, she comes face to face with two redheads who twine themselves around Castle’s arms in a way that only family can manage; the younger of whom looks faintly familiar.  Oh God, it’s his mother and daughter, congratulating him and stroking his immense ego, which _certainly_ doesn’t need it.  And then it all starts to go wrong in a hurry.  They clearly know, or remember, who she is.

His mother looks round at the huge crowd, all picking up copies of his latest, and tells him, “Let’s just hope Nikki Heat does as well.” 

“Nikki Heat?” she bleats, completely thrown by the apparent non-sequitur.

Who’s Nikki Heat?  The name sounds like it’s straight out a bad porn movie.  Suddenly everything starts to become clear.  When he’d said the character was _a bit slutty_ she hadn’t known the half of it.  Surely he couldn’t… And then his mother confirms all her worst fears.

“Nikki Heat.  The character he’s basing on you.”

It’s all it takes.  The thin veneer of calm she’d lacquered over her anger and frustration incinerates in a microsecond.  Castle’s already backing away from her, out of range, but he doesn’t look nearly as terrified as he should be.  She’ll shoot the smirk right off his stupid stubbly face.

Castle is hugely satisfied with the results of his earlier ploy.  Beckett’s swallowed the bait hook, line and sinker and now he’s reeled her in.  Oh yes.  Not to mention that she’s given away two things she’ll wish she hadn’t: that she really is a fan and that she’s still interested in him.  Even if she’s pretending she hates him and hates the book.  Her pungent criticism only bothers him momentarily, until she tells him – _Oh, Beckett, you’ve lost all your game_ – that she’s just doing what he does.  He thinks that he’ll have considerable enjoyment from that admission, since he acts like that to attract her attention, keep her focused on him. 

He’d scoped out the space earlier, just in case… opportunity… came calling, but it doesn’t look like he’s going to get a chance to use his research.  Until his mother decides to interfere.  Beckett’s expression would have been unbelievably funny, if it didn’t look like he might die in the next few seconds.  But… this is his opportunity.  He backs away in a very specifically chosen direction, hiding behind some cardboard cut-outs of him as he goes, luring Beckett nearer and nearer to where he wants her to be.  She’s so angry with him she hasn’t even noticed that they’re approaching the opened exit.  All he needs to do is make it obvious he’s laughing at her and her own fury will carry her past sense.  It’s her biggest blind spot where he’s concerned, and he’s using it to his own best advantage.  Once she gets this angry, she just cannot stop to think.  And when she’s this angry, she’s also incredibly hot.  He remembers, briefly, how she felt beneath him, around him, and desire leaps up.  He’s waited quite long enough.  Far too long.  Time to take Beckett back.

He whips out the exit and slips to the side.  Beckett emerges, as intent as she would be when she’s chasing down a suspect, and when she can’t see him stops and looks around, hostile gaze scoping out the territory.  Castle whistles, and when she spins round on those killer heels and pierces him with a glare he knows he’s won.  She storms closer, fury delineating every curve of her body, and starts to unleash her wrath.

“You cannot use that name,” she hisses.  “It’s not appropriate.”  Castle deliberately puts on an infuriating grin, and considers just how high Beckett’s rage can be stoked.  He knows just how much her incandescent anger feeds her arousal, how she doesn’t seem able to separate the two.

“I like the name,” he smirks.  Beckett steps closer and puts more venom into her already deadly tone.

“Change it.”

“Shan’t.”  It’s childish, and, just like she’s another child in a temper, she’s riled up even further.  She steps another pace closer.

“Change it.”  And another step.

“Won’t.  You can’t make me.”  He just needs to entice her to move one more step.  And there it is, and – even better – she’s raised her hand to jab at him.  He whips his own hand up and catches hers and pulls her against him, holding her arms behind her, just tightly enough that she can’t slap him. 

“That’s better,” he husks.  “You can’t hit me now.” 

He smiles very slowly, watching the realisation dawn that he’s not going to let her assault him, that he’s quite strong enough to stop her doing so, and does nothing else.  He doesn’t think he needs to.  (But he wants to.  Wants to bend those few inches and take her mouth and make her writhe and moan.  It would be so easy, and so pleasurable.)  All he thinks he needs to do for now is hold her tightly for a few seconds (or maybe a few moments, or a few hours) and see what happens.  See what she does about it: because there are two ways this could go: she could step back or struggle or pull away (and he’ll let go of her, instantly, because he will _never_ be that other man); or she’ll stay close, and maybe move a little inward.  And then he’ll know a little more about what turns her on, as if he didn’t already: knows that giving up control does it for her, and suspects, based on earlier evidence, that being restrained does it more.  But she has to come to him.  This is as far as he’ll go to force the pace.  Even if she won’t come to him now, he only has to wait, because there will be other opportunities to get right up close and personal with her, and eventually she’ll part her lips and lean in and consent and that will be all the invitation that he needs, since as soon as he kisses her she’ll melt.  Just like last time.  And when – not if, but when – she melts and flows, he’ll have her, take her, keep her, own her.

_His._

Beckett stands stock still in Castle’s grasp.  Dark erotic instinct says lean in, let the creeping pleasure of being firmly held take over, let him take what her body wants to give.  Common sense, rapidly evaporating in the pressure-cooker of years of suppressed desire, not at all mitigated by one hot night, tries to remind her of all the reasons that this is a bad idea.  She wants him gone, her common sense says, not pulling her so close that she can feel every thick, hot inch of him.  The moist crevices of her body say something very different about being this close, this held in.

She looks up – he’s too tall: even when she’s in heels he’s so much bigger and broader than she, and she’s very conscious of that disparity right now.  He’s big, and he’s just a little overwhelming when she’s captured like this.  It only emphasises the edge of intimidation, the dangerous, overtly sexual magnetism rolling off him in tidal waves, drowning her sense, flooding her with sensation.  Anger and arousal squirm and knot around each other, coiling in her stomach, till she’s lost the ability to distinguish between them: all her mind dragged under as if it’s Laocoon with the serpents.  She’s sinking for the third time: no lifebelt, no rescue.  She succumbs to the dark sea of need.  Nervousness causes her to touch moist tongue to dry lips, to shut her eyes and lean in.  It’s all the invitation that he needs.

And then he’s pillaging her mouth and he’s got one hand on the small of her back holding her hard into him and the other hand in her hair so she can’t move away, can’t leave him, and she’s already moaning and her leg is curled round his and if she brings it any further up her dress won’t be any barrier at all.  He slides his fingers down across her ass to all that expanse of long, long leg, coming to rest high on her thigh and slipping secretively upward under the smooth fabric, snaking over her hipbone and _shit_ she’s so responsive and he is not going to take her up against the wall but he’s so ready and she’s so open and – _no_.  This is not the time for the hard, fast, incendiary sex that had been so good – and hadn’t got him what he really wanted.  This is a preparatory step, to addict her to the ways in which he can heat her up and turn her on and show her what she needs.  (Him.  She needs him.)  Slow burn, not explosion.  His fingers trace over her leg, stretching round to the soft skin of her inner thigh, and all his plans and intentions and control are dissolving as he touches more and more intimately.

Familiar voices dimly penetrate Castle’s sex-sodden mind.  He has to stop, before this becomes a PR disaster, or worse, a matter his family might take an interest in.  He keeps his sex life, such as it is, very firmly separated from his family.  He lifts reluctantly and slowly from Beckett’s lips, swollen from the force of his kisses, and regards her dazed, drugged state with deeply primitive pleasure.  Another step taking her down the primrose path, another step into the opium den of addiction and obsession and making all his (all her?) feverish hot wet dreams come true.

“People coming,” he whispers.  She snaps out of her haze, fierce intelligence back on her face.

“What the - ” He silences her clear tones with a final hard, fast kiss, leaves her sliding out of sight, delicately poised against the wall, out of direct view of the door; butterfly pinioned on a board; and slips back inside to reach a safe distance from the exit before his absence is noted.

“Dad, Grams and I are going home.  Are you coming” – _not_ a helpful phrase, Alexis – “with us or do you need to stay?”  She’s so clean and fresh and bright and hopeful that he’ll join them.

If he stays, he’ll go back out and finish what he started, one way or another.  And he doesn’t want to take the risk that she behaves the same way afterwards: that the Beckett inferno in bed becomes the Beckett ice shelf the following morning.  No.  He’ll addict her, and then she’ll come to him.  He’ll seep into her veins and slither under her skin and she’ll feel the clawing, prickling, desperate need for the high of release that she’ll only, only find in him.  She’ll come to him, because he’ll be the only source of supply to give her satisfaction.  Properly… managed… she’ll beg for her next fix, the next high.  He’ll be the only one who’s enough for her.

His erotic musings are rudely interrupted by his mother’s stage tones.  “Are you coming, Richard?”

“Okay,” he says amiably, and follows his mother and daughter out to the waiting car.  It occurs to him, on the ride home, that he’s just pulled the same trick on Beckett as she had on him in the precinct: departing without a fare-thee-well, leaving her hot and frustrated and alone.  It’ll feed her addiction.

He doesn’t consider the extent of his own addiction.


	12. Where do we go from here?

Mind restored, Beckett slowly pulls her shattered composure back together and makes a few frantic, pointless repairs to her appearance before slipping inside and finding the restroom, unnoticed by anyone who matters.  It wouldn’t be too bad - her dress is intact, no obvious marks - except for the look on her face.  Her pupils are still huge, her lips slightly bee-stung, and she looks like she’s absolutely ready to be pushed up against a wall.  Blood is throbbing through her veins, leaving her flushed and pulsing.  _What the hell just happened_?  Giving in to that was so completely not the plan at all.  One minute she was trying to deal with that insulting, ridiculous name.  Surely he’s only using it to infuriate her?  The next she’s leaned in and being ruthlessly kissed and touched and turned into that hot liquid flow that dissolves her mind and fires her body.  She takes a couple of quick breaths, trying to slow her racing heart, and splashes cold water over her flushed cheeks.  Definitely time to get home.  She needs to stop and think hard about what’s going on here, because it’s just not who she is, or what she does, at all.  She’s never been so completely overwhelmed by – lust.  That’s all it is, sheer lust – before.  Even when she’d been at Stanford, spreading shadowy wings and experimenting with anything that took her fancy, she’d preserved a certain distance, watched and listened and learned and absorbed behind a little barrier, never let herself be overcome or overwhelmed. 

This reaction is disturbingly different.  Both times, she’s entirely lost all sense of time and place, submerged in the instant and only capable of physical reaction.  It’s very unnerving to realise that she can be wholly swept away; that a man she doesn’t even like can so completely overtake her mind and body and turn her on so damn much that she can’t even remember that she hates him before she welcomes him between her legs.  She becomes unpleasantly aware that she’s still extremely damp and very frustrated.  When she exits the restroom and notices (not that she’s looking.  No.) the absence of Castle and both redheads she tells herself that she’s not disappointed in the slightest, rather she is wholly relieved, and leaves with alacrity.   All the way home, unquenched heat burns through her.

Once she’s safely in the haven of her apartment, Beckett pours a sizeable glass of wine and retreats into her well-worn method of solace for all forms of annoyance or pain: a deep, scalding-hot, soothing bath, liberally laced with scented bubbles.  It’s always meant comfort, contentment; since she was very small, and despite all the changes that time has brought to her life it brings her peace: a still centre which holds her apart from the violence that circles around her outside her home.  Gradually she calms, asserts full control of her body, her mind, her life; and starts to put her ferocious focus and intelligence to work on the present problem.  Perhaps if she can analyse it she can deal with it. 

So.  One: (no point in denying this) he is very seriously hot.  Exactly what she likes, in bed.  He couldn’t have suited her better in bed if she’d placed an order, and a detailed specification, with  _Bad-Boys-R-Us._   She wriggles, shifting the bubbles around her.  Two: her reaction to him is terrifyingly intense, whether it’s to his voice or his touch, whether it’s anger or (admit this too, Kate) arousal.  No matter how much she pretends contempt, coldness or indifference, it’s not working.  Three: he’s clever, and starting to be useful, when it comes to solving murders.  Not just a pretty face.  It’s… _helpful_ … to have a biting intelligence to think against; to argue and debate and theorise.  The boys just can’t give her that - competition.  It spurs her on, helps her work it harder, faster, solve it sooner: satisfy the driving demand of her clawing need to give the victim the justice they deserve.  It’s still never soon enough to sate her demons, but it helps.  But, four: she hates him.  For making her think of all of the above reasons, and then because he’s an arrogant jackass who’s scratching a dark-side itch; slumming it in the Twelfth till he goes back to the glitterati and celebrity girlfriends.

But a small snake of honesty squirms into her mind: regardless of how much she hates his smug, self-indulgent style; she wants him.  Badly, darkly, and continuously; and he hasn’t done anything that she hasn’t invited.  He’s in her searing dreams and under her wakened skin; and even if she could get him kicked to the kerb, which is not going to be possible for as long as he’s making nice with Montgomery, it won’t make her feel any better, it’ll just add another layer of repressed emotion and desire to an already pressured mix.  Her self-inflicted obligations already chain her; wrapping her tightly.  She can’t squeeze much more within them, without breaking.

She sinks back under the foam, letting the almost-too-hot water cloak her, just that critical degree away from scalding.  The heat relaxes her tension and the soapy water slides gently over her, bringing her down from her anger, letting her forget that she’s alone.  She reaches for the soft body wash she loves, and begins to lave it over herself: her arms, her legs, her torso; smooth firm strokes, slipping and sliding and suddenly stimulating; the feel of her own fingers melding into the memory of Castle’s harder digits on her, all over her, hands so surely exerting the right to take and hold and possess and dominate.  If she only let him, let go, he could fulfil every fantasy she’s had: reality, not just dreams.  She slips slim hands beneath the bubbles and lets temptation take her: picturing in her mind herself stretched out, arms above her head, silk and steel around her wrists, wantonly desperate and wholly dependent on the firm hands and body of the man who’s teasing, tantalising, twisting her tighter and tighter until she shudders and screams and shatters.

Release surges through her and she lies back in the bath until her breathing slows and the water starts to cool. None of it really helps.  If she has this reaction to him when he isn’t even here, isn’t touching her, she’s already in so far over her head that she’s done for.  Dark, explicit dreams can be explained away as unconscious, purely physical, need; impulses from deep within the hidden canyons of her repressions: but falling into the trap of conscious fantasising to provide relief, using the cause of that unsatisfied desire, is a step down a dangerous trail.  She doesn’t even like him.  ( _but your body likes him_ , says the irritating worm of honesty.  _Your body really likes him_.)

Now what?

She readies herself for sleep, undecided whether going to bed is really the right idea, whether she should stay up a while, read, or watch a movie, anything to avoid the thoughts that are biting at her brain, anything to avoid having to make a decision.  Like, dislike; want, don’t want; anger, arousal.  Hate – not hate.  It’s only about sex.  Nothing else.  But if she doesn’t make some conscious decisions, just like earlier her body will make them for her: give into its craving for size and strength and danger; give in to the raw need that’s been burning through her for weeks.  Simply give in.  That same poisonous worm whispers that she’ll give in the next time he touches her, whatever conscious decisions she tells herself she’s making, because she can’t – or won’t – stand against her own needs any longer.  So why fight it?  Why not, whispers treacle-thick temptation, why not just give in?  Let herself drop into the dark.  Surrender.  It’s what she wants.

But only in bed. 

She can’t afford to surrender her career, her history, her reputation, her life.  The life she’s so carefully constructed to protect her heart and soul from any further damage, to find for others that which she can’t provide for herself.  She doesn’t need to be protected, she doesn’t need to be cosseted or cared for.  Or loved.  She’s been loved: so much loved.  And then it was all taken away.  She’s gartered on the chains she’s made in life; the shackles of obligations to the living and the dead, and she isn’t going to loosen them, cry havoc and let slip the dogs of her own private war.  She’s done that once, and she can’t risk doing it again.  She’s escaped that rabbit hole.  She has to stay away from its edge.

Maybe it could work.  He’s a spoilt, arrogant writer with no interest in her beyond bed and the details of the job and the precinct.  He won’t be digging into her past: he’s too egotistical.  If there’s nothing more to it… if she can keep him away from anything other than bed – shouldn’t be difficult – if she can do that, then maybe she can have this, for a while.  It won’t last.  She’s not looking for a long-term relationship: she doesn’t even like him.  She’ll be bored of his celebrity personality soon enough.  She wouldn’t be looking for any sort of a relationship at all if her body wasn’t reacting like this.  Why him, she thinks angrily.  Why not someone a little more – likeable?  Anyway, it won’t be a _relationship_.  It’ll just be physical.

She retires to her soft pillows and cool sheets; drifting into sleep rather than falling hard over the cliff-edge of exhaustion that so often ends her day.  Her dreams are waiting to ambush her: not gentle or peaceful or slow and sensual as they should be following the soothing bath and self-relief; but hot and erotic and full of dark seduction.

In the morning temptation still nestles on her shoulder, whispering softly, sensually in her ear.  She’s no nearer a decision than she was last night and her indecision makes her angrier than usual.  It being Sunday, no new body, no reason to go to the precinct except to trawl uselessly through cold cases, the only way to silence the devil is to pound the pavements, subsuming everything in the pull and stretch of long, hard running, until the only thing left is the muscle and the motion.

* * *

 

In his own loft Castle is considering, without imposing any restraint on the darker recesses of his thinking, the fastest way to cause addiction, and steering well clear of any irritating impulses to ethics.  There are no ethics when it comes to getting Beckett into his bed.  He thinks carefully through everything he already knows about the effect of his touch, the way she reacts to being held, her inability to separate anger from arousal.  If he were Rook, and she were his Nikki, his creation, then… then he wouldn’t need to do this, because she’d already be his.  He pushes that unhelpful thought away.  She’s not Nikki, and she’s not – yet – his.  So  think about Beckett.

What makes her angry, also makes her hot.  All ways round.  So… each time they’ve… connected…  she’s been furious, and when he’s touched her she’s exploded.  Ah.  That’s it, isn’t it?  She’s always angry: with him, with the situation, with the killer, with the time it takes to solve the crime.  If he adds even a small portion of touch to the cauldron of that boiling, bubbling mix, he’ll make her, and keep her, hot.  And then he’ll reap the benefit, as soon as they’re alone.  But.  But he’s not stupid, and he’s taken to heart the harsh lessons she’s dealt him.  Don’t try to treat her like a weakling – she’s not.  Don’t mess with her job – she’ll never forgive that.  And don’t forget that her car has camera recorders.  That still leaves a lot of options for delicate, erotic teasing; accidental (ri...ight) touching; intimate murmurs.  He’ll addict her, and she won’t even realise until it’s far too late.  She’ll come to _him_.  Oh yes.  She won’t be able to resist.  He’ll use her own blind spot against her and she’ll be in his arms and under his mouth and then beneath him in bed, and _she’ll_ have come to _him_.

And when she’s open and purring and sated and his, he might find out a little more about her.  Just a little, to understand why she’s so angry with the world.  Just to understand enough to keep her with him, to stop her leaving.

Yet again, he doesn’t hear the yammering warning in his head.  He might have control in bed, though that’s in considerable doubt, but he hasn’t even noticed that he’s lost all control of his original strategy.  He might want to addict her, but he’s no less obsessed now than he was on the very first day.

* * *

 

Castle stays well away from the precinct the next day, until a new body drops and Beckett calls: the familiar note of anger noticeably elevated as it underlies her sharp instructions as to the place of the death, brief details, hard click of cut call.  It’s as if he’s done something extra to annoy her before he’s even opened the latest battlefront in their own private war.  He runs back over his conclusions, and decides that her increased annoyance gives him a flanking advantage before he commences the main attack.  Underneath, his curiosity as to the reason for all this anger mixes quietly, unobtrusively, into his still-constant level of arousal.  He needs to know a little more, to ensure he pushes the right buttons to keep her.  ( _I’m leaving, Rick.  I need space.)_ Time to investigate the investigator, when the opportunity comes knocking.   When it does, he’ll invite it in.  If it doesn’t, he’ll start to search it out.  Information, intelligence, after all, is a key component of strategy; the major asset in any war of conquest.  She’d said, with the cold contempt, laced with disbelief, that she still hasn’t wholly lost: _so I could be one of your conquests_?   Well, she will be.  He’ll win this war.

He departs for the crime scene on the self-satisfied tide of a thought through plan.  He’s got it all worked out: strategy, tactics, intelligence gathering.  He’ll start now.  No point in waiting, hoping that she’ll see his qualities without him having to try; that hasn’t worked.  He needs to show her what she wants.

The crime scene  is dirty and nasty and the corpse was completely frozen, though it’s starting to thaw rather unpleasantly.  As the body’s taken away, and the little crowds of CS techs, Lanie, uniforms and Ryan and Esposito disperse to their separate duties, Castle makes sure he’s standing fractionally closer to Beckett than he’s dared to try in public before now; close enough that the slight swing of their respective coats catches the fabrics together.  He hears her sharp hiss of irritation at the interference with her smooth strides; matches her move as she tries to find clear space, gives it three steps and then uses the excuse of the widening street to move away.  It’s not his plan to let her spot his game.  Though if she does… she’ll be so incandescently angry that he’ll be able to roll up all her defences in one swift surge.  Hmm.  That’s not such a good idea as it seems.  _Remember the plan, Rick.  Addiction, not explosion_.

As the case progresses, Beckett feels more and more claustrophobic.  Castle’s too close; all the time: never quite close enough to call out, never quite touching her.  She doesn’t – quite – have the justification she needs to rake him down for it, and as a result her normal level of irritation elevates.  It doesn’t help that she can’t see her way through the case, either.  Nothing is popping. 

Late two nights in, after another long evening alone in the bullpen, circling around and around the conflicting evidence, she realises with considerable annoyance, only fuelled by her lack of decisions about what she wants and the physical effects of Castle’s constant proximity, that she needs someone to argue it with.  And there is, depressingly, only one candidate.  She needs to fight her theories and evidence out against another intelligence, someone who doesn’t think cop.  The conclusion doesn’t please her, but her duty to the dead demands that she leave her personal problems behind.  She’ll do whatever it takes to gain justice for the victim.  And if she realises that she could simply call, or ask him to come to the precinct… she doesn’t let herself know it.

She parks below Castle’s block; stays sitting in her cruiser for a long time.  It’s already too late to pretend that the timing is anything other than another aspect of her obsession with crime solving; no way to disguise that she’s spent another long evening at work rather than having any sort of a life.  At least she can hide that her motives for doing this are at best mixed.  She’s no closer to deciding what to do about him, and while she desperately needs to solve this case, and this is the only way she can see to sort out her tangled thinking; if she were honest with herself she’d admit that he’s been prodding her irritation and arousal into that same mix of frustration and fury that left her naked under him and screaming his name.  She isn’t only here in search of his mind, but she won’t admit that she’s decided what she wants even to herself.

When Castle hears the door sound, he’s surprised.  People don’t normally come around at this hour without a specific invitation, which he hasn’t issued to anyone in some time.  His mother’s … friends… tend to meet her elsewhere, fortunately.  He pads out to find out what new peculiarity this might be.

He is astonished, astounded and absolutely delighted to find Beckett on the other side of the door.  _Ah, Beckett.  You’ve come to me_.  Well.  Well, well, well.  Opportunity’s come calling after all. Arousal leaps up, and he has to batten down his urge to pull her in the door and kiss her till she melts, take her to the bedroom and make her whimper and beg and moan and admit she’s his.  He stops, horrified.  This is his _home_.  He doesn’t bring that aspect of his life home.  He won’t expose Alexis to anything like that.  But Beckett’s _here_ , right within his grasp, and it takes more self-restraint than he knew he had to keep his hands off her.

“Well, Detective Beckett,” he says smoothly, as if he’d always known she’d show up at his loft late at night, “to what do I owe the pleasure?”  She glares at him, and he sees the fury roiling under her cool demeanour.  Just what he wants to see.  He ushers her through to the quiet, dangerous privacy of his study, taking the opportunity to stroke a hand over her back and not missing the shiver that runs over her when he does.  Anger feeding arousal: Beckett summed up in three words.  And here.  He still doesn’t understand that, but he’s sure he’ll find out why in a moment.  She’s wired, electric, humming with the spiky tension that never seems to leave her  - except that once.  He’d dissipated it then; he’ll do it again.  But first, why’s she here?

It takes her a minute to get over the sheer size of Castle’s loft, when the door opens, to put aside the instant feeling of intimidation-by-wealth.  Nothing intimidates her.  Nothing.   And then he slides a hard stroke down her back and steers her into a mostly closed room and she can’t stop the shudder and the heat that flares immediately within her.  She clings to her ostensible, admissible reason for being here: solving the case, bringing justice to the dead, and it clears her mind from the potential flashpoint standing right in front of her.  She’s relieved when he turns away and sits down: less imposing, less likely to cause… distractions.  Although she could have done without the summing up of her similarities to Batman.  That’s all too close to the reality she doesn’t like to talk about: tries not to think about too often.  She can’t face falling again.

And then they start to argue the case and it’s mercifully like being in the bullpen.  Eventually both of them run out of ideas, shoulder to shoulder perched on the edge of the desk, as if it’s the edge of safety.  The only thing left to do to spark a solution will be to go to the apartment that the suspect used to live in.

“We can’t go and walk through the scene tonight.  The current tenant won’t let you in at past eleven, Beckett.”  She moves restlessly, and he sees again the uncertainty that stopping brings her, feels her tension rise, senses that this is a decision point – and decides that he’s going to sway that decision in the right – for him – direction. 

“How about a glass of wine?  I have a nice red just begging to be tasted.”  It’s not the only thing he’d like to have begging to be tasted.  She looks momentarily deeply unsure, and below that he thinks she wants to be persuaded to stay.  Not that she’ll say she wants to stay, or admit her desire for persuasion.  She’s feeling the first small bites of craving, of addiction.

“No.”  She clips out the word, irritation re-establishing itself.  “Driving.”  That’s the one argument he wouldn’t even try to counter.  But she’s _here_ , and he wants her to stay.  He’ll make her stay, just for a while.

Till he’s satisfied.


	13. Night fever

“Coffee, then.”  It’s not a question.  “Just to make sure you don’t fall asleep when you’re driving home.”  She growls.  He slides past her, near enough that he can sense her indrawn breath, and is through the door and in the kitchen before she has the chance to object.  She doesn’t follow him, which does not improve his mood.  She’d only come because of a case, had she?  Only to use his mind as a filter, to clear her own thoughts?  Hmm.  Not very likely, Beckett.  Not likely at all.  And he remembers the way she’d shivered under his touch, and how precisely their minds meshed together.  ( _I don’t follow you, Rick.  Why can’t you just think sensibly?_ )  He makes the coffee and returns to the study, finding her sitting, eyes closed; clearly thinking over the case, judging by the crease between her brows; in an armchair some way from his desk.  He puts the cups down quietly and prowls across to perch on the arm of the chair.  She doesn’t stir, doesn’t overtly react, but her breathing changes, just enough to notice; a little shallower, a little faster.

Beckett is trying to walk through the potential scenarios in her head, and failing.  Maybe coffee will help.  Maybe sleeping would.  But under both thoughts she knows she’s tweaking the tail on the tiger by staying any longer; testing to destruction and beyond the breaking strain of her own self-discipline.  She knows perfectly well, after the initial palm stroke down her back, that he’ll go further, unless she actively discourages it very, very shortly.  Because after all, you don’t go visiting at past ten without a good reason; and you don’t stay for coffee at past eleven if your motives are entirely pure.  Not with a man you’ve already slept with; who fires your body and cremates your control, and who knows it.  If her motives were pure she’d have left already: instead she’s sitting in his study pretending she doesn’t know why she’s there.

So.  Seems like she might have made her decision after all.  Body beats brain: primitive instincts taking over.  But still she hesitates, reluctant to admit her choices to herself, consent by acquiescence, until the initiative is taken from her.

“Why’d you come here, Beckett?”  His voice is low and dark; teasing down her skin.  “This could have waited till tomorrow.”  She shakes her head, clearing it of his drawling, seductive tone.  She can’t afford to be confused by his voice.  But it’s quiet here; traces of cologne in the air, the shifting scent somehow lowering her resistance, reminding her that she’d smelt it on his skin, on her sheets. 

He slips a soft finger over her cheek, traces it lightly across her lips.  She turns her head away from his hand, which means towards him.  Why did she come here?  Well, to argue out the case, her mind says; still pretending she hasn’t decided what she wants.  But her body says something very different, under the subtle, delicate touch.  He’s looking at her as if he knows she’s about to lie: too big, too close, too perceptive.  Arrogant, smug Writer-Boy shouldn’t be perceptive.  And so she doesn’t lie: gives back absolute, bitter, truth.

“The dead can’t wait.  Shouldn’t have to wait.”  He files that, with her earlier confession, for later; notes the acid in her tone, and decides against a smart-ass comment.  There’s more to that remark than meets the eye.  He feels the rest of her untold story begin to push against his mind, and pushes right back at it.  He doesn’t need, doesn’t want, to know it all.  Just enough to keep her.

“You could have called.  Instead you came.”  He brings his hand back to her face, holds her chin to turn her towards him.  Anger begins to burn in her eyes at his presumption, not hiding the dark truth of her desire.  “You wanted to come, didn’t you, Beckett?  Wanted to see me.”  He puts arrogance, certainty, into his voice, and hears her breathing change again, watches her temper start to flare and, just as he’d surmised, her eyes darken and dilate.

“You didn’t just come to talk about the case.”  He slides his finger across her mouth again, just hard enough to unseal her lips.  “You came for this.”  And he kisses her, tastes the dark  blend of anger and arousal, feels the instant heat and her opening for him, and pushes into her mouth.  Just as he’d hoped, _she’s_  come to _him_.  He’s won.  She’s here and she’s his and he’s won.  ( _It’s just a game, kitten.  Why are you so upset?_ )

He’d dreamed of her, last night.  He’d written Nikki, stretched across Rook’s bed, heels and stockings and nothing else: Rook holding her still and apart and winding her up and stopping, winding her up and stopping, tongue and lips and teeth and fingers, till Nikki lost control and screamed and begged Rook to be inside her.  And then he’d gone to bed, aroused all over again, and dreamed of Beckett, wearing that silk-sin dress, pushed up around her waist, panties ripped away: naked and open and ready for him; and in his dreams he’d done everything he already had, and so much more.

He curves a possessive arm across her, so that she won’t move away from him, and proceeds to take complete, leisurely ownership of her mouth; resisting all her efforts to duel him into submission.  It doesn’t stop her fighting him for control, dominance; and as he tries to impose himself on her his kisses become harder, rougher; turn from the smooth dance he’d started with to nips on her full lips and thrusts and forceful tangling; forerunner of what he’ll do.  Beckett responds equally forcefully, still seeking to prove her own control of this game.  But she won’t, in the end.  He’ll convince her it’ll be better if he’s in charge.

He sweeps his hand down under her hip, lifts her without the slightest effort and slides in beneath her so she’s caught in his lap and he can angle her head to open up the curve of her neck and kiss down the line of her jaw and make her gasp; start to open her button-down and slip his fingers inside and play with – ohhh.  Silk and lace and soft skin and hard peaks and he brings his fingers down, unbuttoning her as fast as he’d promised himself he wouldn’t, spreading the cotton shirt wide and gazing down at incarnate wickedness.  _This_ is what she wears to work?  It thunders through his mind that no vanilla cop, obsessed with her job and completely indifferent to anything else, wears _this_ to work.  He’d thought that the silk she wore to their date had been intoxicating: this is equally so; allurement, enticement, invitation.  She wears lingerie like this _all the time_?  That’s another difficult disruption to divert his thoughts during his days at the precinct: already damaged by Beckett’s constant effect on him.  And another facet that simply does not fit.  Something, somewhere, explains these uncorrelated facts: the shattered mirror that reflects all these disparities and discontinuities needs to be made whole.  If he finds out why, the back of his brain whispers, delicately and temptingly, then he’ll have the lever he needs to move her world into his; keep her close: cabin’d, cribb’d, confin’d, bound in.   _(Why are you leaving?  Can’t I come with you?)_ For now, however, he’ll provide a little taste of the drug he’s addicting her to.  And if he can’t resist taking it either, well, he’s sure he’ll be able to give it up any time he likes.

He returns all attention from the lingerie to the person wearing it.  Sinfully gorgeous it might be, but his primary aim is to turn Beckett into the soft, purring, pettable kitten he’d wanted to hold on to, curled into his body, for the whole of the night.  (and longer)  She’s still trying to take control: has somehow managed to shove up his T-shirt and is none-too-gently scraping over his skin, playing with his nipples and encroaching ever further downward, insinuating the possibility of his surrender to her wicked mouth and clever fingers and sharp nails.  No, no, no.  _She’s_ to surrender, admit defeat in this battle and cry for quarter.  He ignores the effects of her forays and essays a raid of his own, sweeping down across the taut line of her stomach to release the fastening of her pants and flirt dangerously with the rim of lace revealed.  She squirms against his hand.  Time to change up.

The arm that’s been holding her head comes round to hold her tight against his chest, other hand detaching her predatory fingers from hunting below his waist.  She gives a disappointed little growl and tries to tug her hands away.

“Uh-uh.  I’m in charge, Beckett,” he murmurs slumbrously in her ear, nipping it lightly to point his moral.  “I’ll decide what we do.”  He kisses wetly round to a previously undiscovered nerve below her ear which makes her wriggle and gasp.  “You like that.”  His long reach allows the hand around her shoulders to stretch down and tease along the edges of her bra, shift the deep crimson silk over her nipples, delicate, dangerous movement that leaves them waiting for more.  “You like that too.”  Neither is a question.  He’ll seduce her just as deeply with dark, evocative words as with hands and mouth.  More so, in fact.  He’ll bring her to the point where she’s so lost in the picture he’ll paint that the lightest touch will take her over the edge.

“If I let go of your wrists will you stop clawing, Beckett?  Or do I need to take... other measures, so you don’t draw blood?”  He punctuates his words with a slide of his hand over her breast, and she squirms again against the shackle of his grip, breathes out a long sigh that might be a moan.

“Yessss.”  Her freed hands slide softly up around his neck, dragging his head down.

“That’s a good girl.  Now... let’s see what you like.”  He strokes the soft skin over her flat abs, circling her navel and gradually drawing sigils lower and lower, till she starts to move against the touch.  He simultaneously slips his hand down to cup through the silk panties and brings his other hand up to cover her mouth, muffle the noise she makes as she pushes against him for the friction she wants.  “Like that?”  but he doesn’t give her space to speak before he strokes across the wet silk, shifting it just as he’d done with the silk of her bra, winding her higher without ever touching her flesh.  “I like this: you all wet and writhing under my hands and not in control at all.  Is this what you like, Beckett?  Someone else in charge?  Someone who’ll tease you and kiss you and play rough with you and who’s big enough to hold you down till you stop fighting and clawing and give in?  Isn’t that how you like it?”

Stop _talking_ , Castle.  Stop using that velvet voice to amplify his actions; stop purring darkly in her ear, predation in every soft, seductive syllable; stop drawling liquid sex down her synapses and through her body.  She tries to move against his grasp and succeeds only in being wrapped tighter in.  And then his fingers move the fabric aside and trail through the oiled silk of her body and he kisses her hard to swallow the moans that she emits when he slides long, thick digits inside her and glides slowly in and out until moan becomes begging becomes his name screamed into his mouth and the world around her is limited to his lips and his hands and his body.

After Beckett shatters across his hand, Castle doesn’t release her, doesn’t in any way loosen his grip.  Instead, he tucks her in against his chest, both arms around her, cradling her against his broad shoulder, playing gently with a wisp of dark hair.  She fits into the cage of his body surprisingly comfortably.  He doesn’t want to let her go yet.  He tells himself, through the last fine filaments of his control, only holding because this is still his house and he _does not_ do this here, that he isn’t finished, she’s not purring yet, there’s more to be done to prove his case; and ignores that he’s broken half his own house rules and is only the couple of strides that it would take to reach his bedroom door from riding roughshod over the rest of them.  He might have satisfied her, for the moment, but not himself: and he’s not convinced (not least because he doesn’t want to stop) that he’s brought Beckett to a point where _she’s_ convinced to stay.

The fingers that are playing idly with her hair catch on a slim chain.  Castle investigates – she’d worn this at dinner, too, though he’d been too busy to investigate later, and to the Storm reading, and he’s mildly curious as to what it is – running it between his fingers and finding not the expected pendant but a ring.

“What’s that, Beckett?”  It’s a casual question, and he certainly doesn’t expect the instant tension in her body and the shutters of her reserve slamming down.  Neither is obvious in her voice when she answers, but she can’t conceal the physical reaction when she’s this close.  His senses come to full attention.

“A ring.”  Her voice stays completely uninflected.  “It’s pretty, but it’s not practical to wear it at work.”  Sharp nervousness is bleeding through her body, and she sits up away from him and then stands, evading his grip without any effort at all, tidying her clothing and looking for her jacket.  It’s time to go.  Questions are not wanted: the neutral, uninformative reply sufficient, she hopes, to hide the importance of the jewellery, to brush him off.

“Don’t go yet.”  Castle reaches for her, but somehow she’s out of range.  Beckett flicks a glance at her watch.  There’s another oddity.  That’s a man’s watch.  Beckett is very put together, and a man’s watch is not congruent with her general style of outerwear, nor the feminine, sexy underwear. 

“I need to go.”  That is not the right reply at all.  She’s not reacting correctly.  She’s supposed to want more, to stay, to let him play some more; all his house rules forgotten.  He wants her so very, very badly; the chance to replace his hot dreams of her spread across his bed with the carnal reality, currently standing in his study.  He stands himself, unobtrusively placing himself as a barrier, leaning on the doorframe, blocking the handle.  It could all be accidental, if he weren’t deliberately ensuring she’ll have to touch him before she can leave.  There’s another opportunity here to catch her; wrap her into his web; willing participant in the dark melding of both their desires.

“Why?  It’s not late.”  She supposes it isn’t, if you don’t want to be on shift before 8 a.m.

“I have to go,” she repeats.

“Go where?  Home?”  He looks sharply at her, notes the slight, inadvertent move of negation.  “Or – are you going back to the precinct?  Seriously?” 

She’s insane.  Or obsessed.

“The dead shouldn’t have to wait, Castle.”  It’s the same as she’d said much earlier.  “They’re too important.”  She picks up her purse.  He takes the implication – that he’s not that important – without visibly wincing at its fanged bite, and stays precisely where he is.

“What do you think you’re going to achieve at midnight?  That’s just being there.  You won’t get any further till we walk the scene.”  A spark of irritation charges his tone.  She should want to stay here, with him.

“At least I’ll have peace and quiet to think in.”  She isn’t even trying to hide the insult.  And that just does it.  She won’t stay here, where she ought to want to, and explore some of the mutually enjoyable games that he thinks she’d like to play – and she’s making it unpleasantly clear that she doesn’t want him at the precinct with her.  Now or any time.  Short sharp sizzling sex and then ignore him?  He doesn’t think so.  His own obsession and frustration and desire combine to destroy the remnants of his fragile control over his temper.

“So you can do it all yourself in peace and quiet?”  His voice is low and cold and angry, edged with acid.  “Yeah, right.  You had to come here so I could think it out.  You couldn’t do it.”  He’s furious.  She’d come for help and now she’s treating his input and his presence as if it were irrelevant, and worse, unwanted. 

“Don’t flatter yourself.  I’d have worked it out myself.  All you did was speed it up a little.”  She’s just as bitter as he.  “Excuse me, please.”  That carries a freighter-load of chilled indifference, though the snap of her own anger, never far from the surface, is lurking like a bear-trap beneath the cold tone.

He moves a fraction, enough for her to think that leaving is an option; and when she takes the strides necessary to reach and try to walk past him, out the door and away from him, grabs her by the shoulders.  She shall not pass.  He’s painfully hard: anger feeding arousal again, but this time it’s his.

“Back off, Castle.”  The sharp edge of contempt is back in her clear voice.  He doesn’t think she even knows her hand is drifting towards where her gun would be.  He doesn’t drop his hands, pulls her hard against his obvious frustration; all set to crash down on her mouth and turn her into the writhing, wanton mess he knows she’d become under his lips – _and he will never be that other man_.  He lets go and steps back as fast as if she’d burned him.  He’d promised himself, so very long ago, that he would never turn into that man, never use wealth or power or physical force to take what he wants without consent.  Not ever.  And he never, ever, breaks his promises.

She’s brought him to the edge of destruction, and it’s all his own fault.  He’s losing control: of the game, of himself.  He has to calm down, regain self-discipline, stop reacting like this.  He’s famously suave, and yet she’s stripped him of every bit of smooth sophistication.  He needs to get her out of his system, stat.  But not like this.  Never like this.

He opens the study door, whispers, “I’m sorry,” as she passes him and watches her walk out, across his loft, out the front door.  He doesn’t dare see her out, doesn’t dare come within arm’s reach of her, scared of what he might do.  She doesn’t look back at him, or acknowledge the words. He shuts the study door again and sags into a chair.   He needs to think.  He really, badly, needs to think.  Instead he stares blankly at the wall and wonders what the hell just happened. 

* * *

 

Beckett sits in her cruiser and, in unknowing duplication, wonders what the hell just happened.  She understands the first part, and the second.  Understanding ceases right about the point he first stopped her leaving and then stepped right back.

So, think.  The already-familiar instant, incendiary, mutual arousal.  Hmm.  Pause there.  It’s clearly not just she who’s struggling not to fall headfirst into the physical at the expense of all restraint and moderation.  He might be very, very good at this, but he’s no more in control of his reactions than she is: unable to stop the spark becoming the arc becoming the lightning storm.  Ah.  That helps, puts certain aspects of this evening into a degree of perspective.  She’d thought the tiger whose tail she was tweaking was her own self-control.  Not so much.  Seems like she’s walked into the middle of a whole streak of tigers, naked and draped in steak.  She’d _thought_ that he wasn’t more than casually interested, not really more involved than a pleasant, brief interlude in his playboy life; scratching an itch and only pursuing her because she’d turned him down, wouldn’t give him what he wanted on a plate.  She should have seen that _that_ might not be true straight after the first episode, but she hadn’t wanted to.  He might have been thoroughly smooth at the beginning of …er… affairs, (certain muscles spasm in memory) but those last few minutes had been anything but.

She applies another dose of focused thought, calling on her skills as a detective.  Review the facts: the course of events.  He’d asked a question that leads straight to areas that she doesn’t want to get into, so she’d decided that was her cue to leave, before he could pry any more.  And she’d stood up from something that had more closely resembled a protective, possessive hold than a simple post-sex hug.  Then he’d gotten angry – he’d wanted her to stay, she’d brushed him off to deal with the dead rather than play with the living – might not have been tactful, but that’s who she is – she’d gotten angrier, and it had all been about to explode into a very physical form of argument, just like all the other times, which would undoubtedly have turned into a very physical form of… something else… when he’d turned marble-white and stopped stone dead.  That was …unexpected.  Oh.  _This_ time had been different, hadn’t it?  He’d not waited to see if she wanted to play: he’d realised after a moment that she didn’t want to – and, like any decent man would, he’d stopped, despite his blatantly obvious frustration.  So far, so normal.  Irritating and flirtatious and blazingly sexual notwithstanding, she’s never thought that he was the sort of man who’d take by force anything that he wouldn’t be given with consent.  And if she’d needed, or wanted, proof of that, she’s got it.   

But that doesn’t explain his utterly appalled reaction to his own actions.  Some noticeable upset, some heartfelt apology, yes: that’s how a decent man behaves when he’s come that close to the line.  Numb horror, not so much.  Hmm.  Beckett scents a mystery.  She pushes the tickle of curiosity away.  If she wants a mystery she doesn’t need to look outside her own head.  All she needs to know is that, however much of a spoilt, wealthy playboy he might be, at core she can trust him to stop when asked.  Even if he still irritates the hell out her, even if she doesn’t like him, he makes her feel so darkly, wickedly good that she doesn’t want to give it up. 

Right.  A blazing affair, no questions asked.  Or answered.  It’ll burn itself out, soon enough, but in the interim she’ll have what she wants: hard muscle and razor mind, alpha bad-boy, the strength that will let her let go.  He’s exactly what she likes in bed, and just for once she’s going to  _have_ what she likes.

She taps out a text.


	14. Sweet deceit comes calling

Castle’s too tired, now, to undertake the thinking he needs to do.  All his brash confidence has cindered on self-loathing: all the certainty that he’d make Beckett come to him, that she’d play his game, dissolved.  The grey fog of failure swirls around him.  It’s a feeling he thought he’d left behind for ever, until he met Detective _I-can-destroy-you_ Beckett. 

Surely he can atone for his stupidity?  The only solution he can see is to convince her to come back to him; keep her with him, show her that he’ll only do what she agrees to.  If he can get her back then he won’t have failed.  And she’d wanted him.  She _had_.  He has to cling to that.  _She’d_ come to _him_.  He always gets what he wants: surely he can have this – her – too? 

The soft beep of Castle’s phone cuts through his numbness.  When he sees that it’s a text from Beckett, he’s reluctant even to open it, still less read it, fearing – with reason, he feels – that it’s an instruction to stop shadowing her.

_Field trip @ 10.  Don’t be late._

Bitter, churning tension drains away, replaced by relief and exhaustion, and he takes himself to bed. 

Sleep comes easy.  Rest is much harder to find.  Castle’s night is broken by sudden startlements and the taint of half-remembered, miasmic nightmare: phantasmagoric figures shifting, skulking through the shadows of his dreams.  When he wakes, he’s not refreshed, and nothing is any clearer.  It takes a long, hot shower and an enormous quantity of caffeine to push him into motion; to act normally; to squash all his old insecurities back into the box they’d squirmed so poisonously out from.  He’s still terrified by what he’d so nearly done; terrified that he’s becoming the man he never wanted to be.

But all his trepidation seems to have been a waste of adrenaline, as he arrives in the bullpen, slightly early for their trip.  In the same way as the last time he’d done something truly stupid, Beckett’s behaving as if the immediate fight and apology had nullified it.  As if it had never happened.  Some small self-belief re-asserts itself. 

She snaps at him just as normal, and displays exactly her normal level of irritation, not scared of him (not that he thinks that likely) or regarding him as if he’s scum.  He’s immensely reassured.  And, he thinks, today’s going to be especially interesting, from a research point of view.  They’re going to a potential crime scene to recreate what might have happened, build a theory – and it was his idea, and Beckett’s approved it, and by implication him, and maybe it’ll produce something useful.  He’ll have done something useful.  Again.  Suddenly he’s much happier.  Several layers of suavity reappear.  (And just maybe, since he hasn’t ruined everything, he can start a new campaign to make it especially interesting from a catching Beckett point of view)

He remembers something as they start off in the cruiser.

“Is your car wired for sound, too?”  Beckett looks blank.  “You know, like it’s got cameras, does it record sound as well?”

“No.  We’re not making movies, so we don’t need a soundtrack.” She doesn’t seem interested in why he’s asking, dismissing it as more background.  He has no intention of telling her why: he’ll save that piece of information for a different day, when he’s not so raw.  When he’s re-established his control of himself, and of this game.  ( _It’s just a game, Rick._ )  It’s not serious.  It’s just an affair, for as long as he wants her.  Which is longer than a couple of nights.  She’ll stay as long as he wants, because he’ll give her everything she wants.  He doesn’t hear his own words.  He doesn’t hear the critical difference from his other affairs.  He doesn’t understand that he’s addicted himself before he’s found out if he’s addicted her.

The current tenant is not noticeably amused – rather _be_ mused – by their request to walk through the scene, thinks Beckett.  Still, this shouldn’t take too long.  It might even help.  Sitting staring at the murder board last night and this morning hadn’t.  She’ll take any dumb idea – and Castle is just full of dumb ideas, though a twinge of truth forces her to admit that even his dumbest ideas ignite her thoughts.  Precinct stats say her team hasn’t lost a jot of its success rate despite her annoying shadow.

Who is right back to his annoying self, examining her with an undercurrent that comes from knowledge, not imagination.  It’s almost a relief that he’s back to normal.  She doesn’t want to deal with complications, or mysteries, outside the job.  She wants something – someone – to keep her mind from burnout because she’s dealing with too many complications and mysteries without ever breaking off or taking time out. 

Walking the scene would be just about bearable, but he doesn’t just want to walk it, he wants to role-play it.  She hates role-play.  It features in every compulsory training exercise and is dragged out every time she has to attend a soft skills (she spits at the idea) course.  She doesn’t need any more soft skills.  She’s the best detective in the Twelfth and what she needs is space to do her job.  She certainly doesn’t need a role-play to work this out.  But her personal nemesis is forcing it on her.

“So you and I are married,” he oozes charmingly.  As if that would impress her.  Especially as he follows up with that patented smug, _I-know-what-you-look-like-naked_ shit-eating grin.  Her teeth clench, along with certain other areas of her anatomy.  Midnight, moonless memory sweeps through her: tension starts to sizzle.

“Married!”  No way.  She’d be in Bedford Hills correctional facility in a heartbeat, doing life for Murder One. She just manages not to say so out loud.  No point letting him know how much he gets to her – as if he doesn’t already know.  Which, following her physical reaction, irritates her even further.

“Relax, it’s just pretend.”  Definitely pretend.  He’s not up for a third failure.  He just wants to get her out of his system, however long that takes.  She’ll give him what he wants, he’ll give her what she wants, and they’ll be done. No-one will be making him react as if he were becoming that other man.

“I don’t wanna pretend.”  She really sounds rattled.  _Gotcha, Beckett.  Again._  

“Scared you’ll like it?” And there it is.  The swift flash of heat in her eyes.  He’d bet his next royalty cheque she wouldn’t want to be married, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t want some more of what he’s providing.  If she’s not hooked yet, it’s not far away.  She covers it up with some trademark snarkiness.

“Okay.  If we’re married, I wanna divorce.”  _If you’re mine, Beckett – even if we’re not married – you won’t want to leave me._   Possessive impulses have his fingers twitching to pull her in, so that he has to hide his hands.

“Are you two like this all the time?”  The tenant looks bewildered, and it only gets worse when they simultaneously turn on him.

“Yes.”  Seems like it’s not just theory where their minds connect.  That’s …odd.  Maybe it’s a side-effect of proximity at work.  He thinks, annoyed again, that it can’t possibly be a side-effect of proximity elsewhere, since he can barely get her to stay long enough to enjoy each other, still less to stay where she should be, caught in his arms, in his bed.  What?  No.  Affairs don’t come to his sanctuary, still less stay over.  They go home from some expensive hotel room.  Or he goes home.  Sleepovers are for grade-schoolers.

If he follows up his heated glances and builds on the electric connection of building theory and _solving it right_ by touching her, even by accident, she’s going to brain him with the saucepan.  Especially as he was right to force the role-play.  (Ugh.  The role-play and that he was right.)  He’s only trying to irritate her (and succeeding).  But deep in the dark valleys of her mind a tempting, sultry whisper reverberates, murmuring that she could just take him home and show him how much she likes certain very limited aspects of his person.  She’s not scared she’d like them.   She _knows_ she likes them.  The physical ones.  And the sable voice, susurrating seductive sentences in her ear which twist her higher without him even touching her.  But the dead demand her duty and her diligence, and so she confines herself to a sashaying swing of her hips as they leave, thoroughly satisfied by the hiss of indrawn breath behind her.  She won’t be the only one left frantic and desperate and out of control.  Her surrender has to be compelled, earned.

The mental current of trading theory and coming to a solution that is finally beginning to feel right, to fit the facts and the story, intervenes before Castle can formulate any plans involving all of Beckett, possession, and making her admit that she’s his during the rest of the evening, after they’ve interrogated the potential, dead, killer’s friend.  He recognises, already, less than six weeks into knowing her, that she’s on the trail of the real answer.  The whole story.  There is absolutely no possibility that she will be distracted – and, even if he didn’t know that trying to distract her would be a short walk off a very high cliff, he’s more than sufficiently interested in finding the real killer that he’s almost as happy to help do that.  There’s more than one form of addiction to hook Beckett, and, it suddenly occurs to him, if her obsession is catching killers, and his mind – and their joint minds – catch killers better, then she could rapidly be led to addiction to the narcotic of his thinking.  Or addiction, more likely, to the results of them thinking together.  To wit, solved homicides.  He should have seen that before, and if his mind hadn’t been so completely blown by the dinner and the dress and the smoking hot body – by the purely physical - he might have.  He’d found her fascinating, for far more reasons than just her body.  If he’s useful; if he helps her solve murders faster – _the dead shouldn’t wait_ , she’d said – then he won’t even have to persuade her to stay.  She’ll want him around.  All ways around.  And because of that, he can go back to being patient, and controlled.  He’ll have plenty opportunity, late at night, after he’s helped her think, to help her with ...other aspects of her overdriven personality.

He’s flicking through the file, mostly because he’s bored and hoping to persuade Beckett into something more interesting on the way home, when he spots an oddity.  The original, useless, police officer had never interviewed the other tenant.  Or if he had, he hadn’t listed it.  It’s an incongruity, so he points it out.  Amazingly, Beckett jumps on it.  Seems it’s a lead.  Back to chasing it down.

From Castle’s point of view, it’s the wrong ending to the story.  The story’s true, literally and metaphorically, but this is not a happy ending.  It’s not making Beckett happy, either, and there’s that strange flick of pain again as she points out that acop doesn’t get to decide how the story ends.  But even then, their perpetrator doesn’t admit anything, and secretly Castle hopes that he manages to avoid charges, or at least being found guilty.  After he’s lawyered up, there’s nothing more to do.

Beckett’s packing up, but the atmosphere has been different ever since they got out of the interrogation room.  Curiosity isn’t so much nipping at Castle’s heels as ripping strips of bleeding flesh from his back.  Beckett isn’t angry, or irritated.  She’s pensive, with more than a hint of remembered misery.  Castle waits, camouflaging his interest in this unexpected change in Beckett and failing utterly to recognise that he’s stalking her story in a way he’s been consciously telling himself he doesn’t want or need to.  The cool of late evening pressing in, the emptiness of the bullpen, the wrongness of the right answer to the instant case, all combine into a time and a place where confidences can be given without consideration of what might be revealed.

“By the way.  It was my mother.  Not my father.”  Even Beckett’s voice is different, not the hard-edged snap of command and authority that he hears in every word by day.  He consciously doesn’t react to her statement, predator-still to entice more words from her.  The spike in his chest is nothing other than the automatic sympathy that he’d feel for anyone whose parent had been murdered.  And then he hears the rest of the story.  No-one should have to go through that.  Dead for no reason: no theft, no rape, no nothing.  And no explanation.  He’d been right, at dinner.  The whole mosaic becomes clear.  But it’s not everything.  Why she wears the incongruous man’s watch is explained, as well.  Her father, five years sober.  Which means, Castle rapidly and invisibly calculates, five years drunk, when he was most needed.  So, both the ring and the watch explained, one for the life she saved and one for the life she lost, in short minutes.  He watches the shutters come back down as she brushes all her unexpected, undeserved confidences off with snark and sarcasm, and then is suddenly gone.

Castle is left in the silence of the darkened bullpen, thoughts prowling through his head.  The strands of his obsession with getting Beckett back – getting Beckett at all, beyond brief encounters – are being drawn into a delicately patterned web of conclusions.  He’d deduced a considerable amount of the story, and she’d confirmed it.  Hmm.  Physically, mentally, they match.  But she won’t recognise it, nor that he’s more than some annoying pest, so she’s reluctant to come to him – though when she does, it blazes.  But, as he’d thought earlier, if she thinks he can be useful, she will come to him.  Just like the other night.  And when they’ve finished with mental usefulness, she’ll give and he’ll take precisely what he, and she, want.

And right there in the empty, darkened bullpen, he has another brilliant idea.  What better way to be useful to Beckett than to solve her mother’s murder?  She couldn’t, just as she couldn’t herself solve this case.  So, he’ll surprise her with his ability.  He’ll apply the resources she can’t – he has contacts everywhere – and present her with the solution.  She’ll see him then.  Oh yes, she’ll see him then.  His intelligence and ability and how valuable he is, and then she’ll realise how much she needs him.  He’ll have healed her wounds, too. Not that that’s his primary reason, oh no.  Not at all.  But it wouldn’t be a bad thing, either.

It doesn’t occur to him in any way at all that there might be a reason Beckett isn’t spending every hour on a case that affects her so fundamentally.  All he sees is that this is a way to prove that he’s just as good a detective as she, or even better.  And since solving crime is her obsession, her addiction, she’ll do anything for the heroin high of solving faster, better, more often.  He’ll be her drug of choice, in the precinct and out.

He’ll give this story a proper ending, and in the process she’ll come to him, and then he’ll have her, keep her, own her; for as long as he likes.  He’s Rick Castle, and he’s going to have everything he wants.  And he wants Detective Beckett.

In the cab home he’s energised, electric: ideas sparking brightly in his brain.  He likes things to be neatly tidied up.  A chaotic early life has given him a certain appreciation for organised, neat endings.   It’s why he writes mysteries.  There’s always a clean, clear ending, no grey areas, no doubts.  As soon as he’s home he starts a new file on his storyboard: Beckett at the centre, and everything he already knows mind-mapped around it.  It’s pitifully little – he still doesn’t even know her first name, for God’s sake.  All he knows is that it starts with a K.  More extensive research is clearly needed.  Starting with the case file.  Ah.  Shadowing Beckett and her team does not allow him free rein in the Twelfth.  He’s going to need some help, and he can’t ask Beckett, obviously.  Asking Montgomery doesn’t feel like a sensible plan.  But if he couches it correctly, one of Esposito or Ryan will be perfect.  He leans on his desk for a long time, staring at the board and considering how, and which of them, to approach.

Ryan would undoubtedly be simpler.  He’s been the easiest to impress, still a little naïve, softer, easier to intimidate into silence if he has to, whether it’s by casting off his pleasant, slightly goofy and definitely unthreatening public, precinct persona to reveal a little more of the truth of who he can really be, if required, or by threatening Ryan with the wrath of Beckett.  Either will work.  But.  But from little shreds and patches of gossip, as he uncovers the back-stories of his subsidiary characters, Ryan’s the new man, relatively speaking, on that team, and Castle doesn’t get the impression that he’s as …attuned… to Beckett, either in knowledge or in personality, as Esposito.  Not that anyone is particularly close to Beckett: there’s a definite distance between her and the rest that doesn’t only arise from her being the boss.  And now he thinks he knows why.  Her history must eat away at her, all the time: she’s not exactly talkative, so although he expects that all her co-workers know the outline of the story, he’s perfectly certain that none of them know the detail.  Nor, of course, does he.  Yet.

So, Esposito.  Castle still thinks there’s a history there, and he also still thinks that it has absolutely nothing to do with sex.  Almost six weeks of observation hasn’t changed that conclusion at all.  It’s all wrong for sex (especially as he knows what’s absolutely right for sex with Beckett).  It’s also all wrong for the type of pseudo-sibling relationship that he’d initially thought was likely, especially as that’s almost the sort of relationship that Ryan and Esposito share.  He thinks about it some more.  He needs to bring this down, because if he doesn’t work out the basic interaction between Beckett and Esposito he’s not going to hit the right buttons on Espo to persuade him.  Esposito is entirely _un_ intimidatable. 

Think about Esposito.  Think about his history.  He was in the Army, Special Forces, a sniper, and it shows. He’s always cool, collected: pitch black humour, not particularly often.  Bad guys offend him.  Castle wonders briefly what his history was, before the Army.  It might have been rather less on the side of the good guys than it clearly is now.  Still.  That’s not relevant right at this time.  Esposito vis-à-vis Beckett.  Respect – mutually.  But also Espo, who’s the very epitome of Hispanic macho masculinity, is not the slightest bit bothered that he’s answering to a woman.  For a Special Forces sniper, which is, all best efforts of the US Army aside, hardly going to be the poster-child for gender diversity supportiveness, to be in that position argues an unusually high degree of respect for her abilities.  Well.  That’s hardly surprising, is it?  Even Castle had noticed her abilities, and her work ethic, in short order.  But that’s not everything, not by half: that could only ever be the starting point.

Ah.  Right back at the beginning, he’d thought that Esposito was a little protective of Beckett.  It’s an odd sort of protectiveness, that sends her first through the door, first into danger – but Beckett wouldn’t accept anything else.  Personal safety is not something she appears to concern herself about, whether it’s bad guys with guns behind doors or the late night streets of New York on her own.  So how does Esposito protect Beckett, without her noticing and (he winces at the memory) raking his skin off for trying?  He stops there.  He knows this is the crux of the matter.  If he can get this right… he’ll have everything he needs.

Yet again, he fails to heed the warnings in his mind.  He doesn’t need to know this, they wail, siren-like.  He’s trying, when he never needs to try, expending massive effort on a woman who, okay, is seriously hot, but really doesn’t seem to care.  And he’s digging into a story he hasn’t any right at all to know.  This is a dangerous obsession, they howl frantically; this is all completely out of control.

It’s all far too late.  Castle’s obsession with Beckett has turned up another notch.  It isn’t just about her body, or even her mind, any more.  He has to know, and finish, her story.  It’s the key to everything he wants.


	15. This is my investigation

It’s not protection.  That absence must be the heart of it.  Or at least, no more protection than he would have provided to his Army comrades.  That’s it.  That’s the style of their relationship.  It’s front-line camaraderie: two people who, in very different ways, have seen more of the dark underbelly of the world than those around them.  The difference is, though, that Esposito chose it, probably used it to give himself a better life.  Beckett – didn’t.

How to play it, then?  Unusually, he has no ideas at all.  It’s also past midnight, and he remembers that he’d told Beckett he’d be there tomorrow.  He needs to know what the post-case paperwork will look like, and he’s managed to avoid that – it’s likely to be extremely boring – till now.  And while he’s researching the paperwork, he might be able to find out the shift pattern.  He needs to separate Esposito from Beckett and especially from Ryan.  Ryan can’t lie worth a damn to Beckett, and he can’t keep a secret from her either.

Tucked comfortably into bed, Castle is very happy with the day.  He drifts into sleep, content that his plan will succeed.  His dreams begin fervidly: Beckett coming to him, wildcat passionate, open and  responsive to whatever Castle wants; finally exhausted, tamed into the purring pet that will curl into him and never leave.  But then they change.  He’s looking at a big man, in the shadows of the stage flats stacked against the wings, leaning down and talking to one of the ingénues.  For no apparent reason the picture is menacing, freighted with intent.  The big man traces a finger down the girl’s cheek, and she flinches.  He can’t hear the conversation, hidden as he is, but the big man’s animated, the girl resigned, slumped.  When she leaves, she looks utterly defeated; the big man ugly in his triumph.  And then he turns around and looks straight toward where Castle’s concealed –

And he wakes, shaking and sweat-soaked. It never happened.  He never saw that happen.  It was just a story he made up, and got into trouble for telling, when he was young.  Still, it takes him a long time to sleep again.

* * *

 

Flush with satisfaction at Beckett actually sharing something of herself, and forcibly putting away his nightmare in favour of the earlier dream, Castle decides that it’s time he persuaded Beckett to accept him providing a drink that’s a little more palatable than the coffee from the old machine.  Addict her to his provision of decent coffee, perhaps.  He’ll satisfy her needs.  But paperwork is excruciatingly boring.  He watches for a while, asking as many questions as he needs to, till he’s got as much as he can stand for now.  He spends some time making sure that the charged tension between himself and Beckett doesn’t drop to any material extent, with a combination of suggestive remarks and scorching glances whenever no-one else is looking. Then he starts to watch for an opportunity to speak to Esposito without either Beckett or Ryan overhearing.  He finally finds it towards the end of the day, Beckett having temporarily disappeared in a cloud of barely suppressed annoyance and heat, without excuse or explanation, and Ryan having sloped off quietly as soon as his shift finished. 

“Esposito, do you wanna have a beer tonight?”

“Whassa matter, Castle, you got no friends of your own?”  But Espo’s grinning at him.

“Nah.  They’re all off on vacation.  You’re the last resort.”  He grins back, perfectly at ease with the banter.  Espo pretends to check his calendar.

“Seems I can fit you in.  You buying?”

“Sure.  Espo” – Esposito quirks an eyebrow.  “Leave Beckett out of it, huh?  I can live without her glaring at me and curdling my beer.”  Esposito sniggers.

They’re in a bar Castle knows, not the precinct’s style at all.  The Old Haunt, where Castle – and many others – used to drink beer and write, in, depending on whether inspiration was flowing or not, wildly varying proportions.

“Why’re ya buying me beers, Castle?  Didn’t think we’d got that far in our relationship.”  Espo smirks, evilly.  Castle grins back, all boys and beer together.

“You’re cute, Espo, but you’re not really my type.”  Espo salutes the riposte with the beer bottle, and takes a healthy swig.

“Yeah, man, we all know what your type is.  Big” – he makes a gesture that indicates exactly where _big_ fits in – “blondes.  ‘S all over page six.”  Castle grins some more, and thanks Christ that he’s a damn good actor and that Esposito hasn’t picked up on his driving need to get Beckett into bed.  Until Espo opens his mouth again. “Or tall brunettes with a badge.”  Fuck.  Time for some damage control.

“I only like brunettes who like me.  Beckett thinks I’m a pain in the ass.  I’m not into being shot.”  And time to point the playboy image.  The last thing he needs is Esposito getting the impression that he’s seriously chasing Beckett: that would ruin Castle’s reputation.  “She doesn’t know what she’s missing, though,” he leers.  Esposito looks very unimpressed.  More helpfully, he also looks as if he believes that he, Castle, has not got it on with Beckett.

“Yeah, right.  Me ‘n Ryan – an’ why ain’t he here? – don’t believe you’re just about the research.  Somethin’ about bein’ _detectives_ , ya know?  An’ we _detect_ that you’re sniffin’ around after Beckett like an alleycat after fresh fish.”

Castle makes a wide-armed gesture of _you-got-me_ flavour.  “What can I say?  She’s seriously hot.  But she’s not interested.”

“She hasn’t shot ya yet.”  What?  It occurs to Castle that Esposito had been remarkably easy to persuade to come out for a little male bonding.  He’d not figured that Espo might have some things he wanted to say to him.  Now he’s really intrigued.  He’s not nervous, though.  Esposito can undoubtedly take him in a fight, but Espo would find it a lot harder than he clearly expects.  That might be interesting, if he needs to sharpen up.

“Huh?”

“She hasn’t shot ya.  If she hated you as much as she makes out she’da shot you already – accidentally, ya know.  Or maimed you. We’da helped.”  That’s a very casual way of letting Castle know the score.  That says in cop-speak that if he hurts Beckett he’ll be beaten up by Esposito and Ryan.  Okay, message received and understood.

“Yeah, well.  She’s made it pretty clear she’s not interested.”    Except when she’s alone with him in either apartment, or out back of the book party.  “Plenty other fish in the sea.”

Esposito downs the rest of the bottle in one and reaches for another.  Halfway down that, he starts again.  “Y’ know you might be a good thing for her, right?”  Castle doesn’t have to fake a stunned, dropped jaw expression of complete dumbfoundedness.  While he’s still searching for breath, Esposito barrels on, clearly intent on getting this out before he realises what he’s doing and stops.

“She’s at the job all the time.  Barely goes home,” – Castle nods: he’s seen that – “comes out occasionally,” – Castle hasn’t seen that yet, in six weeks – “pals with Lanie Parrish.  That’s her life.  We all know she’s heading for burnout, but we can’t do anything about it.”  Esposito’s dark, intent eyes go cloudy for an instant.  “Saw it in others, back in the day.  Saw them sent home ‘cause of it, too.  Don’t want that to happen.  She’s too good a cop.”  He flicks his gaze back up from the table and looks Castle squarely in the eyes.  “Don’t care how much of a pain you are, Writer-Boy, if you stop that.  An’ if you’re annoying her, it’s taking her mind off the dead.”  It’s the perfect lead-in.

“Esposito.  Beckett told me about her mom and dad, late Thursday, after we closed the case.”  Esposito’s head jerks up, and he comes to swift, focused attention.

“She told _you_?”  There’s serious shock on Espo’s face.  “Man.  It took her three _years_ to tell me, and that was only ‘cause I found her asleep over the file in the break room.  Shit.”  He downs the rest of the bottle, and Castle unobtrusively summons a bartender to order more.  “They never caught him, ya know.”  Castle nods sharply.  “She spent all her time searching, till the Captain kyboshed it.  Dunno why.  She don’t talk about it.”  Esposito looks briefly menacing.  “How come she told you?  Didya ask her?”  Castle’s not intimidated, and shows it.

“No.  She just came out with it.  Pretended like it was no big deal.”

“So why ya askin’ me about it?”  In the face of Esposito’s suspicious glare and ever-increasing level of attempted intimidation, Castle decides on the highly unusual route of truth.  For a given value of truth, that is.  Esposito certainly doesn’t need to know anything about his plans.

“She looked really upset.  Well, for half a minute.  Then she locked it all down again.  Hell of a thing, losing her mother and her dad hitting the bottle like that.  I don’t wanna say something that trips her up.  So I thought if I knew the story I could keep away from anything sensitive.”  Esposito, several beers to the good, looks faintly receptive.  “I can’t ask her now, can I? – that’d just be crass – so I thought if I could read the file I’d know what to avoid.  And I reckoned you’d be the one to ask, ‘cause you know her best.”  Faint receptivity overlays considerable scepticism.  Esposito’s  focused sniper’s stare is currently centred right between Castle’s eyes.  Castle drops another layer of his public, charming, man-about-town persona and gives Esposito a hard stare back.  Espo raises an interested eyebrow.

“Not quite such a wuss as you pretend, Writer-Boy?”  He looks Castle over, assessingly.  “Ya hide that well.”  Just as Castle thinks they’re about to start trading what weights they bench-press – which he reckons he’ll lose, despite Espo being at least four inches shorter – he relapses into silence and beer.

“Why’dya really want this?  Don’t feed me any more of that shit you already tried.  What’s your real story, Writer-Boy?”  Clearly Esposito is far from stupid.  Equally clearly, for some as-yet-unknown-reason, almost certainly connected to the earlier part of their conversation, he’s going to give Castle a shot at this.

“I’ve got some contacts, top-class pathologist, that sort of thing.  They might see something the original team missed.”  Esposito looks dubious.  “The sort of people the NYPD can’t bring in.”

“So?  What’s it to you?”

“The story isn’t finished.  I wanna finish it.”  He stops there.  _Why_ he wants to finish it is not a matter he intends to discuss with anyone.  He’ll use it to show Beckett that he’s plenty enough to match her.  He doesn’t admit to himself that he’d been stung by the pain in her eyes, that he wants to take it away, protect her from it.  Esposito glares at him.

“You aren’t gonna use it in this book, are ya?”

“No.”  That’s thoroughly definite. And true.  He doesn’t put in that sort of raw emotion.  It’s not what sells.  Well, it’s not what his fan base expects, and if he did it once he’d have to do it every time.  He’s keeping enough out of this draft already, what with the private chapters, without adding emotion to the mix.

Esposito’s still glaring.  “I don’t believe your reasons, man.  Even if you do.”  Huh?  He’s perfectly sure of his reasons.  Solve the case, prove his brilliance, win Beckett and keep her in his bed each night and be in the precinct with her each day.  It’ll add interest to his life, till he’s bored again.  Espo’s still talking.  He’s said more this evening than Castle’s heard him say in six weeks.

“But Beckett’s got no life and that’s ‘causa this.  I don’t think you’ll find squat that she couldn’t, but no harm in you tryin’.  Long as you never let on to anyone that I helped you.  She’s off shift tomorrow.  Doesn’t mean she won’t turn up, but I’ll get you into archives at some point.”  They clink bottles, deal done, mutual respect.  Serious men’s talk dissolves into more beer and pretty evenly matched pool games, till the bar closes.

Castle goes home well satisfied with his efforts.  Tomorrow, he’ll find out far more of the story.  More, he’s established a much closer connection with Esposito, who’s a man who needs Castle’s wealth, fame and contacts not at all.  It feels unusually good to have a male acquaintance – friend, yes, a friend - who’s not either competition or trying to use him.  Not that anyone gets to use him any more: still, it’s good not to have to be alert for it, to guard against it.

* * *

 

Esposito texts Castle early on Saturday, to say that Beckett’s turned up in the precinct: he’ll call when she goes home.  That’s not till after seven, and Esposito’s long off shift when they surreptitiously meet at the back door to the precinct and sidle up the back stairs to Archives.  Esposito tells Castle innumerable times that if he so much as whispers the word _files_ where Beckett can hear it, he will hurt, repeats his imprecations and injunctions to secrecy, and leaves Castle in the dim, dusty stacks of boxes, in a small puddle of light on the scarred, cheap desk that’s all that’s available in the musty silence.

Castle begins with his normal process in reading any new document, whether it’s his own writing or someone else’s: a full-speed read of the whole file, giving him the overview position and not a little of the detail; followed by a much slower study, taking the time to read every detail.  He found that talent useful, back when he was still doing most of his own contract negotiation.  Now he mainly finds it useful to frighten his agent and lawyers into realising that he reads, and retains the detail of, everything they send him.  He might be casually sloppy about the arrangements for PR events and publishing dates, but when it comes to the legalities he locks that down cold.

It’s horribly sketchy.  Almost no evidence, and not much impression that particular effort had been put into the investigation.  They’d had a brief look at Beckett and her father: left that as soon as their alibi checked out.  Pathology showed nothing much about the wounds.  No theft, no rape, no assault beyond the wounds that killed her.  Some background information: she’d been a lawyer.  Nothing on any of her caseload that the investigating officer had thought worth following up.  Written off to cold cases, after not too long at all.  In fact, rather quickly.

Castle leaves that to ferment in the back of his mind for a while, and reads the area of main interest again.  Beckett.  Katherine.  Finally, her first name.  Katherine.  Or Kate, perhaps?  Then, she was 19, at Stanford, pre-law with a minor in Russian.  Accelerated entry.  Hmm.  _Very_ intelligent.  Semester in Kiev – so well-travelled, potentially.  The whole world in front of her, and it was all taken away.  Ah.  That’s what she’d said in the restaurant.   No wonder it had been off-key.  Those kids hadn’t been much younger than she had been.  And no wonder she’d been rocked when he’d spun her story: he’d been far too close to truth for comfort.  Well, now he’ll find her an answer, a proper ending to this story.  He thinks there are several areas that don’t seem to have got the attention they deserve, starting with the pathology report.  He can have that re-investigated relatively easily.  Dr Murray will be only too happy to have an intellectual problem to play with, and he’ll keep it quiet.  It might take him a little while, but there isn’t a better pathologist in New York.

He prowls quietly to the copier, keeping a wary eye out for anyone else, and is pleasantly surprised that it doesn’t require a code, or cash, to work.  He rapidly copies the whole file – he can’t remove it: there’s no telling when Beckett, or someone told to perform a cold case review, might want it – and slips out the precinct as unobserved as when he came in.

When he reaches home he manages to deposit his copy file in his study without anyone noticing, and starts to add the pitifully thin extra information to his storyboard.  He’ll leave that for now; let it settle, and cuddle close the new information about Beckett.  It makes him feel better about how hard he needs to work to keep up with her, if she was clever enough to gain accelerated entry to Stanford.  He stares into space for a while, mind idle, roaming randomly, but always centred around Beckett.  Body and brains, in one beautiful, bad-ass package; shortly to be wrapped, stamped, addressed and delivered to him. 

* * *

 

Beckett can’t imagine what she was doing, talking about her past to Castle, of all people.  She never opens up like that: it must have been the effect of the case.   She can’t imagine, either, that it was of any interest to him.  At least he was polite enough to pretend to listen, and not to make any of his smart comments.  He doesn’t need to know it, and her history isn’t relevant whether or not she wants to take up the open offer of a red-hot affair.  In fact, it would be far better if it was ignored entirely, by both of them.  She can’t decide what she wants: she knows she needs to put the job aside, but good as an affair would be, she isn’t sure if it will help.  Too much chance of distraction from her primary purpose, perhaps, if she weren’t very careful.  But then again, she doesn’t _like_ Castle, he’s just very, very good in bed.  So maybe he wouldn’t distract her.  Her mind changes from one day, even from one hour, to the next: depending on her mood.

On Friday she acts as if she’d never said anything, retreating behind the hard shell of Detective Beckett and finding that she’s more annoyed than she had been for a few days by Castle’s innuendos and heated gaze; by his hand on her back every time he allows her to precede him through a door or into the elevator, which is every time she goes through a door or into the elevator; that he’s standing or sitting closer than she’d like; (she tells herself that she’d _like_ him to be sitting outside the front door of the precinct) and  - ah-ha.

She’s beginning to recognise a pattern here.  He’s deliberately stoking her annoyance, because every time she’s lost her temper with him since he goaded her into sparring she’s ended up so fired up that anger has turned into sex, or near enough.  Hmm.  Clever tactics, Castle, and a very accurate analysis of how she rolls and what turns her on initially – but only effective if she didn’t notice.  And now she has.  Not, of course, that she didn’t consent, nor was it … unenjoyable.  Still, she doesn’t have to let him carry on with it.  She smiles sharply to herself, and is more than a little pleased to see a swift flick of uncertainty on Castle’s face.  _Time for a little payback, Castle.  How much will it take to turn you into an out-of-control mess?_   Oh yes.  She knows how to do that.  A little extra swing and sashay, the quick, enticing peek from under her eyelashes, the seductive bite on her lip – she hasn’t missed how he reacts to that – and the bedroom look that says _I know just what you want and I want it too._ He’ll be wrecked in two days.  In three, he’ll just reach out and take it.  And she’ll have won, all ways up, (she thinks about _up_ , and wriggles slightly) because she’ll be in control.  Until she doesn’t want to be any more.  She’ll dance on the razor blade’s edge and never cut herself.

But not today.  She’s still recovering, papering over her admissions, and to keep this in manageable territory she needs to have locked those back down and away.  No chance of revealing anything.  Anyway, if she wants a blazingly hot affair to keep her from burnout, then she’d better keep her history out of it.  It certainly hadn’t helped last time: and she doesn’t need to be looked at as if she can’t cope, as if she’s the victim.  She’s put the worst of it behind her, climbed out the pit she’d dived right into, with the help of a good therapist and the knowledge that her focus on that one case, however crucial to her, reduced her focus on the others.  Other people’s dead demand she gives the same amount, the same degree, of care she would to her own.  Their dead can’t wait: they shouldn’t have to.

She forces herself to go to the gym to spar, overcoming the hard flex of the memory of sparring with Castle as part of her strategy to get back on top of her game.  When she returns everyone’s gone, and she can try to deal with some more of the never-ending paperwork and unfinished case load without interruption or distraction.  She’ll still have to put in some time tomorrow, but she hadn’t any plans anyway.  It’s not as if she’s got a hobby, or a social life.

It’s not as if she cares.


	16. Let's dance

After a couple of days without a new body and consequently no good reason to go to the precinct, and with no real inspiration, at least for the publishable document, Castle is bored and frustrated, so he shows up in the precinct anyway to interrogate Beckett about every infinitesimally tiny detail of procedure, cold case review, the ME’s office and actions and the hierarchy of command and 1PP.  He can’t say that he’s interested in it in the abstract, but he is very interested in the application to the particular.  He wants to know what should be done on a case - such as might be Johanna Beckett’s case – if it were investigated properly.  And of course along the way he can get up close to Beckett, who seems to be simultaneously blocking him out and inviting him in.  His well-developed predatory instincts are twitching, and the electric tension is rising with every hour. 

He’s well aware she’s no naïve innocent: he’s sure her walk, her demeanour, and the aura she’s cloaked around herself, are not in any way accidental or unconscious.  Every time she moves there’s sensual purpose behind it; every time she looks up through her lashes at him it’s an invitation, an allurement.  She walks with a swaying stride that’s only one step off a catwalk, and every click of her heels says _take me if you dare_.  He knows, would know even if she wasn’t wearing almost-revealing open-necked button-downs, that she’s revelling in the silky slither of bad-girl underwear, and just thinking about what that underwear might be, and what it has already been, is stretching the limit of his control.  He knows she’s playing him, and even though he knows he shouldn’t react, he can’t step back from the line.  He can’t take his eyes off her legs when she sits, when the fabric of her dress pants pulls over her thigh when she crosses her legs.  She’d worn stockings, that hot hard night.  The memory lashes at his mind.  His fingers curl against his own leg to stop himself running them over hers to find out if she’s wearing them now.

She’s wound him so tightly, in just one day, that he can barely focus on the other part of her attitude.  She’s trailing sex in front of him, but behind that she’s as barricaded as the day he walked in.  More so, in fact, because she’s exuding a kind of cool satisfaction rather than the irritation and anger he’d come to expect.  He needs to work out what’s changed: what’s stopped her descent into his trap.  But when she leans over the keyboard at that same precisely judged angle to make him think he can see everything and actually show nothing at all he can’t think.

He leaves early.

He can’t stay.  He can’t stand watching her tease and tantalise and not just take her.  He can’t hold on to his control and his plan any longer and the only alternative to leaving is to push her into an interrogation room and cross-question her body with his own until she admits her provocation, her aiding and abetting of his arousal.  For the first time in a few days, he needs to turn to the private chapters of his book and his fictional Detective. 

It doesn’t fit into the structure, but then again his private chapters don’t need to have a structure, they’re just a way of writing out his frustration.

Rook’s annoyed.  Nikki’s shut him out, locked herself off, ever since she’d been soft in his arms.  She’s made absolutely sure any hint of a different personality doesn’t happen again, been her usual spiky, irritated self: claimed work as an excuse for that, and tiredness as an excuse for not seeing him otherwise.  So, sufficiently late one night that he’s almost sure she’ll have left the bullpen, he picks up a bottle of good wine to serve as an introduction and is shortly found tapping on her apartment door. 

Her greeting is …neutral, at best: pleasant, but cool, thanking him for the wine, an uninflected offer of a glass to share it.  He accepts, of course.  He can hardly solve this aspect of her mystery if he leaves again, and besides, the wine should be excellent.  He misses her trademark irritation, and its swift mutation into heat when they’re away from the job.  He misses more the slight moves to openness, to letting him see into her life.

Castle stops typing at that.  Seems that his private chapters aren’t just about relieving his sexual frustration.  Seems like his subconscious thoughts, expressed through his fingertips, aren’t wholly aligned with what he actually wants.   He’s sure he doesn’t care about Beckett’s life.  He only cares about solving the mystery so she’ll … appreciate… him.  Anyway.  This is fiction.  He can scribble it out and then forget about it; get everything back on track and stay in control of himself.

Rook sits down close to Nikki and slings a muscular arm unsubtly along the couch back behind her.  She doesn’t object, but then again she doesn’t snuggle in either.  He might as well be her brother, if she had one.  That’s a new level of blocking off.  Not irritated, not aroused, not even physically close.  When she puts her wine glass down he moves his arm around her and tugs until she’s properly tucked against him.  Again, she doesn’t object, but doesn’t make any move to get closer.  Now he’s more annoyed.

“What’s with you today?”

“Huh?”  She doesn’t sound as if she’s paying much attention. He turns her into him.

“What’s up?  You’ve barely looked at me, still less spoken, since I got here.  What’s your problem?”

“Nothing.  ‘S been a busy week, and I’m tired.”  Rook makes a conscious effort to produce his lazy, seductive smile.

“Then c’mere, and let me make it better.  C’mon.  You know I’m a very comfortable pillow.”  Nikki blinks, as if she’s shaking out her thoughts, and suddenly wriggles in.  Rook hoists her on to his lap and arranges her comfortably.  “That’s better.   Much more friendly.”  Nikki sniggers.

“That what the cool kids call it?”  She seems to have returned to something like normal.  Rook takes full advantage of it to slide his hand insinuatingly over to rest on her waist, sketching small patterns on her clothes.  But he doesn’t get the feeling that she’s really any closer than she has been, even if she’s decided that it’s okay to be physical.  He pushes his luck and traces a slow fingertip down her neck and into the vee of her shirt, undoes the top button and plays with it a little, waiting to see what she’ll do.  He’s too uncertain of her mood today to push harder, to persuade her in the way she likes, as he’s often done, knowing that she’ll tell him fast enough if it’s unwelcome.

Castle stops again.  This isn’t helping him.  It’s neither realistic in terms of Nikki and Rook nor in terms of how Beckett’s behaving.  He can’t even write well right now.  He deletes it all and decides on a drink instead.  Conveniently, the whiskey and a glass are right there.  He pours a moderate measure – getting drunk isn’t going to improve either this evening or tomorrow morning any – and sips it slowly, trying to reorder his thoughts away from Nikki/Rook and back towards Beckett.  Now he’s not actually in her presence he has enough blood circulating in his brain to think.

She’s suddenly oozing allure: slinking along an extremely careful line in the precinct between his hyper-awareness of her and the boys not noticing; prowling through the steppes of sexuality as soon as they’re alone.  Exactly how she hasn’t previously behaved.  But it’s very cool, for something that’s so hot.  There’s no … unleashed passion, no fiery personality, in it.  It doesn’t seem like she’s prepared to share her deeper feelings, just her body.  Hmm.  Well.  That’s certainly what he usually likes.  Used to like.  Still likes.  He only needs to solve the mystery to make sure she doesn’t quit before he’s ready: he can only ensure that she doesn’t if she’s entirely impressed by him.  Wealth doesn’t interest her – that’s quite a relief: an unusual difference – but intelligence and strength do.  He’s proved his strength.  Now to prove his intelligence.

He’s fairly certain she’s trying to keep control of the game.  Well, why would he be surprised by that?  With one very important exception, she needs to be in control all the time.  In which case she’s trying to push his buttons – and succeeding.  Oh _hell_ , is she succeeding.  Question is, is he going to let her?  A better question is, can he stop her?   And the best question of all is, does he want to?  To the last two, the answer is undoubtedly _No_.  To the first – well, that’s a different matter.

In fact, it might just play wholly into his hands.  No harm in letting Beckett think that she’s in charge of the playground, if it’s going to give him what he’s wanted.  Especially when it means, must mean, that he’s succeeded in addicting her in at least one way.  And when she sees how clever he is, when he’s made it better for her, she’ll be impressed and want him.  Everywhere.  He’ll fill the empty space where a partner should be in the precinct, and the empty space in her bed.  Though he expects that he’ll need to …persuade… her a little.  Enjoyably.  She’ll be passionate, under his persuasion.  Oh yes.  She might think that she’s in control of this rapidly developing affair, but the only person who’s going to be in charge, in bed or out of it, is him.  He’ll decide what they do, he’ll decide how long it lasts.  He’ll decide how much he needs to know about her.  (Everything.  He needs to know everything.)  And in the meantime he’s going to take her up on her offer.  But he’s going to fight back first.  He’s not going to be reduced to a puddled pool of arousal without making damn sure that he’s pushing her buttons too.

He sips his whiskey again and contemplates the following day.  She’s playing _you can look but you can’t touch_.  At least, he thinks so.  He smiles slowly, edgily.  The last time she’d played that game... they’d ended up in her bed.  Because he’d touched: because she’d wanted him to touch.  If she’s going to issue invitations, she can hardly complain when they’re accepted.  He’ll attend her private party.

* * *

 

Beckett reaches the precinct early next morning confident of her ability both to leave Castle a  mindless mess and to preserve her own barriers whilst - just for once – having something, and someone, that she simply, uncomplicatedly and purely sexually wants.  No more than that.  At least, this morning she’s decided she wants it.  She’s dressed to project her normal cool, professional image.  She never, ever drops her focus on the cases.

But that doesn’t mean that she can’t have some confidential pleasure along the way.  Underneath, she’s pleased herself: soft satin and flattering cut: lingerie that would, if she so pleased, drive men (and one very particular man) wild.  If he’s going to spend his time making it clear that he wants to see what’s under her outerwear, with those scorching invitations to carry on where they left off on any of the previous occasions, then she can spend her time making it very subtly clear that she’s wearing something worth looking at.  It’ll show in the flow and sway of every movement: the fractional slowdown in her stride that turns it from sharp to sensual.  She’s wholly comfortable in her own skin and sexuality; perfectly attuned to her own body; perfectly sure, after yesterday – she hadn’t missed his heat nor his early departure – that everything is proceeding according to her plan.

Without Beckett really noticing the change in her thinking, she’s begun to find Castle almost useful, and thus notice when he’s not there.  Not miss him.  Definitely not.  And he’s still enormously irritating.  But he is useful.  Her simmering irritation and flaring anger hasn’t damped her desire, but increased it: still, knowing that she’s comfortably in control of the game right now gives her a calm, cool overlay; coating the aspects of her life that she’s tried to put behind her; silently sliding into place above her anger so that fury doesn’t force her reactions.  She’s not doing this casually, or recklessly, but eyes wide open.  She’s prepared to give up control in bed, but absolutely nowhere else.

Her intentions for the day begin to be frustrated as soon as Castle arrives.  Much to her suppressed annoyance, he starts with a slow, top-to-bottom evaluation that should have incinerated her clothes: intent and focused enough that Beckett feels like a specimen pinned to a board.  When he’s finished, he’s developed a slow, lazy, knowing smile that makes it completely clear, without a hitch in his breath, that he wants to find out if his suppositions are correct.  He’s not making any effort at all to tone down the level of tension, magnetism and slight intimidation that he’s projecting; nor any effort to stop encroaching on a rather larger area of space than usual.  In fact, Beckett thinks, he’s consciously projecting a considerable degree of predatory alpha masculinity.  But along with the anger goes the familiar frisson down her spine, reminding her how she’d been caught in, held down.  Frisson shifts to full-on shiver when Castle leans in towards her and produces a voice that shouldn’t be permitted outside a bedroom: several notes deeper and softer than normal; wrapping silk shackles around her and quite deliberately invoking the memory of darkly pleasurable rough dirty sex and hard dominance.  Fortunately it also isn’t audible more than six inches away.

“Something up, Beckett?”  She appears completely unconscious of his meaning.  It’s completely faked.  She then improves the moment by raising one enquiring eyebrow.

“What d’you mean?”  His voice drops further.

“You seem a little less… hmm… buttoned-up than usual.”  The direction of his gaze, some distance below her face, says considerably more than the words.  Beckett doesn’t fall for the implication.  She doesn’t even twitch an eye downwards.

“Ever hopeful, Castle.”  She leans forward herself, and watches him completely fail not to follow the vee of her shirt.  She smirks nastily.  “Eyes up here, Castle.”

He complies, none too quickly, and then returns to the lazy grin.  “Pretty,”  he says, in the same deep drawl.  It’s perfectly clear that he doesn’t mean the china elephants on her desk that he’s picked up to play with.  Beckett splutters, infuriated despite her good resolutions to keep control.  Inside, she’s flipping between wanting and not wanting; do or don’t; and her own indecisiveness is not improving her mood.

Castle decides to quit while he’s ahead.  Or at least on level terms.  He’s content that Beckett isn’t going to have it all her own way, today, and it’s still early.  Time for another tack.  He wanders into the break room and concocts two coffees.  From one addiction to another.  He’ll go back to the primary addiction later.  When he reappears Beckett is fathoms deep in a pile of paper which had definitely not been on her desk five minutes earlier, and concentrating fiercely.  He puts a mug comfortably within her reach and drifts off to ask Ryan and Esposito some technical details about fitness levels, shooting qualifications, and any other matters he can think of that will keep him out of range and able to watch unobtrusively to see if Beckett realises what’s happened.  He’s quite unreasonably triumphant when she automatically picks up the mug and downs most of it in one go.  He’s even more so when she doesn’t notice what she’s done and drinks the rest.  It’s pathetically petty to be so pleased that he’s one up, he thinks, and doesn’t care.  He refills it twice, and she doesn’t even notice, just drinks it.

Beckett resurfaces from the sea of paper considerably later and finds that it’s lunchtime.  Since there’s been no body, she’s not entirely sure why Castle’s still there, except to annoy her, but the relentless flow of paper has returned her to coolness.  A swift assessment tells her that the boys have already got lunch – they probably asked her, but she hadn’t heard.  Castle’s out of sight.  Perfect.  She’ll go out and try to think.  She doesn’t appreciate her own indecision: it makes her teeth itch.  She’s at the elevator in instants.  Paperwork days at least give her the opportunity to have a break at lunch.  When it’s a new case she tends to forget unless reminded.  Just as well the boys’ stomachs remind them regularly, and they remind her.

Just as she steps into the elevator the hairs on the back of her neck tell her that Castle’s slipped in behind her.

“Sneaking off without me?  How unkind, Beckett.  Don’t you want me?”

“I want my lunch,” she snips.

“That’s nice.  Let’s have lunch together.”  She doesn’t need to look at him to know that he’s grinning.

“No.  Thank you.”  It’s an effort, already, to preserve calmness and civility.  She’d thought she could find a period of peace, a chance to regroup and plan the afternoon’s strategy; and Castle’s disruptive, looming presence is not required.  As he follows her out the elevator, she puts a swing in her step and feels rather than hears the cadence of his stride and breathing shift.  She ignores the palm over her back when he opens the door for her and ushers her out.  She doesn’t ignore it when he doesn’t remove it.

“Hands off, Castle.”

“You didn’t say that the other night,” he purrs softly into her ear.  “But have it your way.”  And he takes his hand away.  She still feels it heating her flesh, which does not cool her temper.  “Where are we going for lunch?”

“ _We_ are not going anywhere,” Beckett snaps, good intentions and calm fracturing.  “ _I_ am getting my lunch and going back to work.  _You_ can do what you like.”

“Anything I like?”  The purr is more predatory.  “Well now, Detective, why don’t we just talk about that.  We could talk about how we interact.”  Her step falters.  “As a team, of course.  What did you think I meant?”  Now he sounds completely innocent.

“You can do what you like.  Alone.  I am getting my lunch.  Alone.”  Her irritation is back in full.

“That’s not very sociable.”  His tone makes it perfectly, infuriatingly clear what he means by _sociable_.  She’s just about to round on him when she abruptly realises that he’s doing it again – trying (and succeeding) to rile her so that she gets angry and loses control of the situation.  Well, not this time.  She crams down her annoyance and changes tack completely.

“You have no idea how sociable I might be.”  She stops, leans against the nearest wall, looks him up and down with the same leisurely, undressing, assessing, heated examination that he’s been using on her.  “With the right person.”  She moves off again, catwalk prowl in full swing.  His gaze is blazing down her back.  She doesn’t even need to see him to know that he can’t take his eyes off her, and the edge that gives her is fully reflected in her movements.

Castle’s losing his calm of a moment previously almost as fast as Beckett is re-establishing hers.  She’s managed to flick him on the raw with her last comment – the only right person for Beckett is going to be _him_ \- and that, combined with his general irritation that she’s put up a barrier again just when she’d opened up a little, that he’s not managing to control the game, and that he’s deeply aroused and wholly frustrated by her behaviour; is removing his normal layers of sophisticated suavity as fast as snow melts in spring.  He catches up with her again, and consciously controls himself.

“Why don’t we find out?  We had such a pleasant date last time, let’s do it again.” 

“That was _not_ a date.”  She’s annoyed again.  It hadn’t been a date.

“Let’s see now.  I took you out to dinner, you dressed up,” – his eyes flare for a moment as he remembers how she’d dressed up – “I escorted you home.  Oh yes, and I kissed you.”  And the rest.  “So how was that not a date?”

Beckett stops and turns full on to him.  “Because you tricked me into going out to dinner with you.  So it wasn’t a date.”

“You enjoyed it, though,” Castle says smugly.

“Did not.”

“Liar.”

“Am not.”

“Are too.  You liked it when I… hm… kissed you.  You said so.”

“Did not.”  Castle raises disbelieving eyebrows and smiles in the most infuriatingly self-satisfied way he can manage.

“You did.  But if you’re not sure, we should try it again.”  He slides up close beside her.  “But not in the middle of the street at lunchtime.  I’d be embarrassed.”  Beckett splutters, lost for words.  “So I’ll arrange for dinner somewhere quiet tonight.  You won’t even have to dress up.  See you later.”  And he walks off before Beckett has a chance to object.  Only the fact that she’s in the middle of Manhattan and she is an adult stops her giving in to the temptation to indulge in the sort of incandescent tirade that normally comes from a spoilt two year old.  It would certainly make her feel better.

But then she stops to think.  Castle can arrange whatever he likes, but he’ll have to find her first.  And nothing says she has to make it easy for him.  He should have asked her.  Not told her.   She’s not going to be pushed around by an arrogant playboy.  She’s flipped back from _do_ to _don’t_ , because she’s not going to be taken for granted.

She taps out a completely untruthful text that simply says _I’m busy tonight._


	17. Are you ready for this?

“Yo, Beckett,” Esposito calls when she returns.  “Whatcha done with your shadow?  Finally shoot him?”

She smiles snarkily.  “ Nah.  Not worth the jail time.  He went off.  If it weren’t for you two, I’d have perfect peace all afternoon.”   She sighs theatrically.  “Chance would be a fine thing.”  The boys harrumph.  Ryan looks wounded.

“We know you’d miss us.”  Beckett looks dubious.  Esposito chimes in.

“Just like you’d miss Writer-Boy.”  Beckett emits a strangulated squawk.  “Can’t fool us, Beckett.  You even let him make you coffee, all morning.  Must be love.”  She chokes.

“Not likely.  You been reading romantic novels again, Espo?”  She’s scrabbling for some game.  “Or maybe you’ve been smoking something.”

“You know I don’t do that shit.  Look at your desk.  You drank his coffee.  It’s sorta sweet.”  Espo is smirking evilly.  Beckett looks at her desk and finally processes that her entire morning’s coffee intake had come from a mug not a paper cup.  How had she not noticed that?  No wonder Castle was so smug at lunch time.

“Didn’t work, did it?  Never even noticed it wasn’t the machine.”  It’s the boys’ turn to look disbelieving.  Possibly fortunately, Montgomery chooses that moment to emerge from his office and enquires smoothly whether he had mysteriously missed a memo about a new half-day vacation or – his tone sharpens – whether anyone is planning to do any work this afternoon.  Conversation abruptly ceases and five seconds later all that’s audible is the shuffle and swish of paper and the tick-tack of keyboards.

At the end of her shift Beckett exits unusually quickly, without paying attention to the quiet beep of her phone.  She doesn’t go home, that’s far too simple.  She’s moderately certain that Castle will try first the bullpen and then her apartment.  She won’t be at either: she’ll be busy.  Instead she heads for the morgue, and specifically Lanie’s office.  She actually finds Lanie leaning over a corpse in the lab.

“Hey, Lanie.”

“Who are you?”  Beckett looks a little guilty.  Lanie glares fiercely.  “You haven’t been round my way ‘less there’s been a body in weeks.  What’s been keeping you so busy, girlfriend?”  Lanie wiggles her eyebrows and acquires a salacious smile.  “Or should I ask who?  Have you finally come to your senses and started having some fun?”

Beckett is absolutely certain she hasn’t given away a single thing.  Not one eyelash flickers.  Lanie looks at her very, very hard.  Beckett looks back completely nonchalantly.  Lanie continues.  So does Beckett.  Finally Lanie starts to laugh. 

“Have it your own way, then.  Why’re you here?”

“Paperwork got boring, so I thought I’d come by.  Wanna go for a quick drink?”  Lanie produces a second version of the hard stare.

“What’s up?”

“Huh?”

“You’re doing something spontaneous.”  Beckett looks surprised.  Lanie carries on.  “You never do anything without planning it.  So how come you’re down here without even a call first, wanting to go out?”

Beckett avoids the question in favour of a different answer.  “Do you wanna come out or not, Lanie?”  Lanie’s not fooled.

“Sure I do.  Let’s go.  And on the way you can tell me what’s going on.”  She leers hopefully.  “You can tell me all about your Writer-Boy.  That man is cute.”  Cute is not the word Beckett would have thought of first.  _Infuriating_ would have been high up the list.  ( _Hot_ would have been right up there too, says an annoying little voice in her head.)

“He’s not _my_ Writer-Boy.  He’s a pain in the ass.  You can have him.”

Lanie starts to clear up and pack away.  “Where d’you want to go, Kate?  Bar?  Restaurant?  Club?”

“Bar.  Let’s go to the Village.  We can pick when we get there.”

Lanie finishes putting her instruments away and heads for her coat.  “I know,”  she says, “let’s go to the Bleeker Street Bar.  Good drinks, fast food.”

“Okay.”

It being a week night, the bar is not particularly busy, and it’s easy for them to find a table and start on a glass of wine.  Some desultory gossip passes the time, and the wine, till Lanie gets round to what she really wants to know.

“Right, girlfriend, spill.  What’s going on between you and Castle?”

“Nothing.”

“Ri..ight.  Nothing.  Izzat why the air sizzles like fat on a hot skillet every time you’re in the same room?  Because you are not fooling anyone with that line.”

“Nothing.”  Beckett gulps a large mouthful of wine and preserves a bland expression.

“You’re an idiot.”  Lanie is disgusted.  “He’s hot, he’s really interested, and he’d suit you down to the ground – a lot better than your last boyfriend – and you won’t even look at him.  What is wrong with you?”

“Don’t like him,” Beckett mutters sulkily.  “He’s a spoilt playboy.”

“You forgot hot.  I’ve seen you checking him out.”  Beckett chokes on her wine.

“You have _not_.”  Much to her relief – lying to Lanie is always, eventually, a losing game – her phone rings.  It’s Esposito.

“Beckett.”

“Beckett.  Where are you?”

“Why?  You got a body?”

“Naw.  But Castle just came by.  Didn’t say anything, but I think he’s looking for you.  He didn’t look happy when you weren’t here.”

“I’m with Lanie.  Girls’ night.  You got a problem with that?”

“Nah, not me.  C’n me and Ryan come along?”

“Not unless you’re going to put on a dress and make-up and be girls for the evening.”

“Don’t think so.  Wouldn’t want to show you up.  Seeya.”  Click.

Lanie’s looking interested.   “What’s all that about?”

“Espo.  Ryan.  Trying to muscle in.” 

“Then why are you suddenly looking like the cat who got the cream?  What’s going on?”  Beckett simply smiles gently, looking very feline indeed, and says nothing.  She’s thoroughly satisfied that Castle, having made the mistake, again, of _telling_ \- rather than _asking -_ her what would happen is discovering the error of his ways.  It sounds like he’s hunting for her.  She idly checks her phone and notices that he’d texted, a while ago.  It’s fairly short.  _Dinner at Po, 31 Cornelia St, 7.00._   Really?  Like she’ll just toddle along like a good little obedient girl because he says so?  It’s not even an invitation, let alone polite.  It’s an order.  And she already told him she was busy.  No way.  She puts her phone back down, leans back, and takes another soothing sip of wine, savouring the taste.

She doesn’t notice that Lanie’s read the text.

“Thought you said there’s nothing between you and Writer-Boy?”

“ ‘Sright.”

“Nothing as in nothing but a condom?”  Beckett spits her wine all over the table.

“What the _hell_ , Lanie?” she splutters when she recovers her breath.  Lanie grins evilly.

“Writer-Boy invites you out to dinner and you don’t even tell your best friend?  You gotta share, Kate.  Spill it.”

“So I don’t wanna go.  I told him I wasn’t going.” 

“No?”

“No.”  Lanie’s face is shouting _Liar_ louder than a campaign trail loudspeaker van.

“You are dumb.  Seriously, you are completely dumb.  Why do you do this?  I can’t remember the last time you went out with anyone that wasn’t Ryan, Esposito and me.  You need some fun.”  Realisation seeps into Lanie’s face.

“And you haven’t answered my question yet, apart from wasting good wine on the table.  I didn’t hear a _no_.”

Beckett hates it when Lanie starts investigating.  She’s worse than a Rottweiler, once she gets her teeth into something.  Sometimes Beckett wonders why Lanie isn’t in the bullpen, rather than the morgue.  She’d be a better detective than a lot of others.

“You did, didn’t you?  You got it on with Writer-Boy.”  Lanie looks like she’s about to get up and do a dance of triumph. 

Beckett tries something that almost never works – barefaced lying.  “No.”  It’s greeted with extreme scepticism.

“I don’t believe you.  But even if you haven’t yet you’ve thought really, really hard about it.”  She looks mischievous.  “I think you should go to dinner.  And then I think you should jump his bones.” 

“I thought you were my friend, not a dating agency.”

“Sure I’m your friend.  As your friend I’m telling you to have a good time.  It’ll dry up if you don’t use it.”  Beckett makes a revolted face.  “Anyway.  You’re too late to cancel.  You’re not mean enough to stand him up.”  She looks at her watch.  It’s 6.55, and somehow most of the wine is already missing.  Oh.  Lanie’s right.  Much as she would love to do so, she’s never been that nasty in her life and she isn’t going to stoop to that level now.  No matter how satisfying.  She won’t be that woman.  She drains her glass.

“I’m going.  But I don’t want advice on my love life.”  There’s a very rude noise from opposite.

“If you had a love life – or even a sex life – to advise on it would be an improvement.  You’re just sulking ‘cause you know I’m right.”

“You’re not.  Even if I have to go to dinner I’m not getting it on with Castle.”  She stands to leave, and wobbles slightly.  Too much wine, too fast, on top of too little food.  She’d better go.  The sooner dinner starts, the sooner it will be done.  Dinner with sexy bad boys when she’s already buzzed is not going to be one of her best ideas.  She needs to stay in some sort of control of this and that doesn’t mean letting him dictate where they’re going.  In any sense of the meaning.  She’ll get a cab home, as soon as dinner’s done.

Lanie looks after her friend as she leaves.  She’s a touch worried about her.  Kate’s downed most of the bottle without really noticing, which is absolutely not her usual behaviour, even if she has the hardest head in the bullpen.  She’s not normally rude, either.  At least not without it being deliberate, and in humour.  This would have been just mean.  She wonders if she should stir the pot a little, and then thinks better of it.  Though she’ll keep that under review.  If she should just happen to run into Castle, however…

* * *

 

Castle hadn’t paid much attention to Beckett’s refusal.  He’d assumed that she was simply being her normal, contrary, irritated self; and relied on the rest of her current behaviour to support his view that she’d come for dinner.  And after that, he could escort her home and kiss her and… et cetera.  Thinking too much about … et cetera… leaves him contemplating actions that, whilst wholly satisfying, are just a little too far from civilised.  At least for the early afternoon.  But Beckett’s been playing _look but don’t touch_ for two days, and every single movement has been a come-on, so Castle’s pretty sure that she’ll come out to play with him.  He’s also sure that she’ll tease him first, dragging out her surrender.   He smiles darkly, only too ready to give her what she wants.  Eventually.  He’s got some ideas for teasing her, too, till she does surrender. 

He texts her brief details, so sure she’s coming that he doesn’t really take any care to consider what happened the last time he tried to tell her to do something, nor the implication of her initial refusal.  He’s addicted her, he’s certain of it, so she’ll come, because he wants her to, and she wants it, too.  But it would be polite to go to pick her up.  Of course, it will also ensure that she actually does come out to dinner.

A slight chill runs over him when Esposito tells him Beckett left straight after the end of her shift – at five p.m.  She never leaves at end of shift.  It would be amazing if she’s ever left before seven p.m.  Or nine.  He calls on his acting ability and wanders off, claiming he’d wanted to ask some questions and if Beckett’s not there he can’t get answers.  The instant he gets out of view he lets the act drop.  He gets a cab to Beckett’s apartment, but it doesn’t take much persuasion and bonhomie – and a tip - for the doorman to tell him that Beckett hasn’t been back.

About that point he starts to think that he might have mis-stepped.  And since he doesn’t like the feeling of discomfort that that thought brings, ( _that was a bad idea, Rick.  Why’d you think I’d like that_ ) he covers it up with irritation.  She’s playing with him, and she’ll find out that that’s only a good idea if he gets to play too.  Still, she hasn’t answered his text, and her manners will – surely? – stop her standing him up in quite such a publicly humiliating way.  He wishes he were certain of that.  The more he hasn’t found her, and the longer she hasn’t replied, the more he thinks that he’s got something wrong.  It abruptly dawns on him that he’d not actually asked Beckett anything.  He’d told her, and assumed.  Oh.  Oh shit.  He did that before, didn’t he?  And it hadn’t ended well – ended with him sitting on his own in the bullpen without so much as a word of goodbye.  He’d better be at the restaurant early, because he is absolutely certain that if he is not there sitting down at 7 Beckett will arrive, take one look, see he’s not there, and leave.  If she comes at all.

He’s sitting at the table, acting cool, at five to.  He realises, with some considerable annoyance attached to the insight, that he hasn’t been this nervous about a date – it _is_ a date, whatever Beckett says – since he was twenty.  He doesn’t like the feeling at all.  No-one has ever stood him up in his whole adult life.  It just does not happen to him.  He’s not going to let it happen to him.  If she doesn’t show up he’ll find her.

But he is appalled to notice just how relieved he is when Beckett walks through the door a few minutes late.  Fortunately by the time the staff take her coat he’s recovered.

Beckett may be a bit buzzed, but she’s not so buzzed that she doesn’t notice the flash of relief across Castle’s face when he sees her, even if it’s gone by the time he stands up to greet her.  She doesn’t feel like thinking about that right now: she’ll save it for later.  But… if he’s relieved she’s shown up then he wasn’t nearly as sure of her as he’d pretended.  Hmm.  That’s interesting, for spoilt, arrogant, _any-woman-I-want_ Castle.  He’s – off-balance – she surmises, a little doubtful about her deduction.  She’s set him off-balance, and he doesn’t know what to do about it.  Hmm, again.

“Hey,” says Castle, sounding just as offensively confident as ever.  If, that is, she wasn’t listening very carefully.  Ah, yes.  There’s the undertone.  She’s heard that from any number of witnesses, trying to pretend they’re not shocked or upset or lying.  Uncertainty.  Somehow, some way, she’s rattled him.  Deep down, pleased satisfaction curls around her.  She’d already established that he’s not in control of the physical connection, any more than she is. If she can rattle his confidence, then this isn’t the unequal contest she thought it was.  It’s a lot more interesting than that.  Um.  Another glimpse of something real, a personality that might have some redeeming features, under the smug, arrogant façade.  Maybe he’s not taking her for granted any more.  She doesn’t let a hint of her conclusions reach her face.  She’ll think about them later.  When the wine’s worn off.

“Castle.”  He doesn’t hear anything in her voice except cool greeting.  No enthusiasm, no desire, no heat.  He looks full at her, produces his sexy, bad-boy, dangerous,  thousand-watt smile, and drops enough of his own shields that she can – if she looks – see that he is genuinely glad she’s here.  He rapidly tells himself that he’s always glad of the company of a very seriously hot woman, and knows he’s lying even as he does.  He has got to get control of himself.  He’s getting close to in too deep.  He isn’t going to get in too deep.  It’s an affair.  Just an affair.  He’s forgotten that right at the beginning it was only going to be a one-night stand.

The smile should be illegal.  It blazes round her, flames down her nerves, heats her blood.  She’s sure it wouldn’t if she hadn’t had the wine with Lanie.  She sits down, a little faster than usual.  It’s difficult not to remember what that smile means.  He’d had it last time they’d had dinner.  He’d had it at the Storm evening.  He’d had it at his apartment.  It means hot, dirty, uncontrolled sex: edgy and dark and rough: a struggle for dominance that she knows he’ll win, through size and bulk and sheer hard strength, though it won’t stop her trying to succeed herself.  She won’t just give in: he has to work for it.

“It’s nice here.  Have you been before?”

“No.  You?”

“Sometimes.”  He suddenly produces a completely different smile.  “I brought Alexis here a few times.  She liked it.”  He looks fond, a little wistful.  “She was a lot younger then.”  Beckett watches him, considerably interested in this other aspect of Castle’s personality.  It’s surprisingly likeable.  Likeable?  Writer-Boy likeable?  Oh no no no.  She doesn’t want likeable, doesn’t want anything that might get in the way of a civilised ending in due course.  The deeper she gets in the more this will hurt.  She only needs to have some uncomplicated fun: have exactly what she wants.  She gives everything to the job, surely she’s allowed to take this?  But against that, the job demands her heart and soul: she can’t afford distractions when she’s standing for the dead.  She’s already forgotten that she was going to go home alone straight after dinner.

She takes a deep breath, flexes her shoulders slightly, bites her lip quite deliberately and watches Castle return to the playboy she doesn’t need to like.  His answering look has the hints of hunger and darker implications that are all she wants to elicit: all she needs to know.  She’s decided – at least for this moment - where she wants this evening to go, and it doesn’t involve going home alone any more.  Arranging that shouldn’t be hard – and if she does it right, Castle will think it’s all down to him, when she’ll have made her own decisions.  She smiles seductively and lets Castle take precisely the meaning she intends: that she’s sufficiently impressed (finally) by his moves that she’s prepared to play nicely.  There will be time enough to change tack later in this meal, if it doesn’t seem like a good idea any more – if he annoys or upsets her.  Given the way her view of what she might do flip-flops like a suffocating fish out of water, she could have changed her mind five times by coffee even if he doesn’t.

Castle thinks he’s managed to cover his uncertainty and relief well enough that Beckett hasn’t noticed.  Now to ensure that he doesn’t slip up about what he already knows about her history from the file he’d read. Something tells him that could be fatal.  Not necessarily metaphorically.

“Where’d you go to college?  Here in New York?”

“NYU.”  He wordlessly invites further comment.  She doesn’t know why she carries on.  “Transferred from Stanford after” – she stops.  Castle, unusually tactfully, says nothing, asks nothing.  “Then the Academy.”

“Ah.”  He very obviously – but Beckett is still grateful – changes the subject.  “What’s your name, Beckett?”  He grins.  “After all, this is our second date.  Don’t you think I should at least be allowed to know your name?  If I have to keep calling you Detective Beckett – or should I call you Miss Beckett, like a Victorian novel? – it’s going to be awfully formal and long-winded.”

“I didn’t think you worried too much about being long-winded, Castle.”  He pouts at her, opening his big blue eyes even wider.  It’s ridiculously attractive.  “And this is not a date.  We have never had a date.”  Castle ignores those comments.

“But it’s not fair.  You know my name – even if you never use it – but I don’t know yours.”  He looks suddenly bright.  “I could just ask Espo or Ryan.  They’d tell me.”

“Not if they want to live without digging in Dumpsters, they won’t,” Beckett mutters, not quite sufficiently sotto voce for Castle to miss it.

“C’mon.  Don’t I know you well enough to know your name?”  And just like that all the dangerous, hungry tension snaps into place across the table.  Castle’s eyes have gone dark and feral, and it’s perfectly obvious that he’s thinking of every way he’s already _known_ her, and all the ways he intends to do so again.

“Not yet,” Beckett says lightly, and before he can say anything else, “I’m hungry.  Are we going to eat or have you got me here under false pretences?”

Castle’s left with no option but to deal with the distraction of the waiter and the ordering and a discussion of the best wine to accompany gnocchi with rabbit and linguine vongole, and by the time that’s done the moment to press has passed.  Still, there will be other ways to persuade Beckett to tell him her name; other points at which, he is sure, she will be very eager, indeed desperate, to answer anything he cares to ask, if only he won’t stop.


	18. How much do you want it?

After the waiter has departed, Castle decides that he’s had enough of trying to elicit answers from Beckett, who’s as impervious to personal questions as ever, and moves on to the main purpose of the evening: being lining up… dessert. He drops his voice into the bedroom tones that he’s pretty certain work on Beckett – and so they should. They always work. Even Beckett won’t resist the smooth undertones that imply sin and seduction: late nights and candlelit rooms; silk sheets and soft skin under sliding strokes. He’ll ruin her with words; slip inside the eye of her mind and show her everything she can have, everything he thinks she wants. All she has to do is let him in; let him take the lead; let herself let go and be his.

The last two days and his biting nervousness that he’d mis-stepped again have left him in need of proving – but in truth he couldn’t have said, if asked, whether he’d be proving it to Beckett or to himself – that she should be his. Possessiveness was barely leashed after the first time he’d been with her: and because he’s currently so fundamentally uncertain about where he stands with her (though he won’t admit that to himself either: no-one turns him down, now; no-one doesn’t want to be with him) it only increases it. He wants to make it obvious that she’s _with_ him: take her hand; stroke her cheek or kiss her lips; have his arm around her when they leave. Except that he can in no way guarantee that he’d be able to do any of those things in public without severe consequences, which will do nothing for his reputation or continued un-maimed existence. Still, he can be possessive in private, and judging by previous times Beckett will enjoy it.

“Guess you weren’t as busy tonight as you thought, Beckett?” His voice says _I knew you were lying when you texted_. His grin says it rather more loudly. Beckett looks – sulky? – oh, that’s cute.

“I was out with Lanie. By the time I saw your text and noticed that you weren’t paying any attention to what I said – like you usually don’t – Lanie wouldn’t let me cancel.” She looks horrified by what she’s just let slip.

“ _Lanie_ wouldn’t let you cancel?” Castle doesn’t like that at all. Beckett would just have ignored him – stood him up – if it wasn’t for Lanie? “You’d have stood me up?” He’s upset, and it shows.

“I told you I was busy tonight at lunchtime. You ignored me. How’s it my fault if I hadn’t seen your text and you’d have had to sit here on your own?” And now she sounds angry. This is suddenly not going well at all. “Perhaps if you paid some attention to what other people tell you rather than just doing what you want regardless and assuming everyone will be desperate to hear from you, you might have a little more success?” There's a cut-glass edge on every clear, cold word.

“I have plenty success. Just because you don’t want to admit that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.” He’s just about to continue on with a statement of the order of _I succeeded with you, didn’t I_? that will ensure absolute disaster and a blazing public row, guaranteed to be on the gossip pages tomorrow morning, when the waiter returns with the wine and gives both of them a chance to step back from the brink. By the time Castle’s suggested Beckett tastes it, she’s politely declined and it has actually been pronounced very pleasant, the formal courtesies have cooled both their tempers sufficiently to regain safety. Food arrives shortly thereafter and distracts Beckett, who is none too sure that her annoyance has not arisen at least as much from too much wine on an empty stomach as from a genuine grievance. She needs to get her temper under control again.  

She doesn’t ask herself _why_ it is that Castle can irritate her so quickly, nor why that can so rapidly turn to and from a very different form of heat. She knows why. She’s sure of why. It’s because he thinks he can have what he wants without any effort. She’s ignoring that actually he had gone looking for her, which – if she thought about it – she might have to realise is more effort than he’s needed to show in years. If she thought about that, she might have to connect it to her other, earlier thoughts. And she doesn’t want to do that, because then she might have to realise that he’s already changed some from the cocky, casual, arrogant man who intruded on her life six weeks ago and hasn’t had the decency to leave it since. She might also have to realise that her opinion of him has changed too. Though in both cases – if she thought about it, which she definitely isn’t doing - she’s sure that all that’s changed is that he’s useful in solving cases. On a personal level, he’s as infuriating as ever - and sexy, but she’s not thinking that either. Nothing’s changed there. Nothing at all.

She concentrates on her food almost as hard as she’s concentrating on not realising anything about Castle, and doesn’t look up.

Castle is also concentrating on his meal, interspersed with a reasonable degree of concentration on the wine. He needs something to take the edge off his temper and hurt. The thought that Beckett, who’s been giving him subtle and not-so-subtle come-ons for two days, would have simply left him sitting on his own and humiliated in public because he’d been careless with his words is more painful than he likes. It doesn’t fit, either. She’s not been nastily, pettily, meanly hurtful before, and he doesn’t see why she should start now. He scraps euphemistical thoughts of lining up dessert and goes back to cool civility and precinct procedure.

“Why is there so much paperwork? Isn’t that inefficient? I thought you were all out chasing criminals all the time.”

“It’s got to stand up in court. If you can’t prove you did it by the book – which means paperwork – it gets trashed by a good defence attorney. Or even a bad one. Waste of time catching them if they just walk free later.” She pushes a morsel of gnocchi round her plate, and doesn’t look up. “It’s hard enough to catch them without them walking.”   The gnocco completes another lap of her plate. Beckett’s focus on its motion would do credit to an Olympic athlete’s coach.

“Won’t the court take your word for it?” Beckett’s expression when Castle says that suggests both that she’s bitten an especially sour lemon and that he is hopelessly naïve.

“No. Every judge, juror and attorney knows that there are bad cops. Every one of us is tarnished by them. Every case, that’s pulled out to excuse the defendant. ‘My client is accused of shooting his wife through the head but it wasn’t him because the cops faked his DNA at the scene.’ ” Her bitterness spills right over. Castle’s clearly pushed a different button here. “A few bad apples and we’re all rotten.” Her head comes up and her eyes are blazing with anger. “So no, Castle, the courts won’t take our word for anything.” She stops, looks back down at the plate, slumped into herself again. “Hence paperwork.” There’s a pause. “And even if there weren’t dirty cops, there are plenty lazy cops.” Castle comes to attention.

“How d’you mean, lazy cops?”

“Cops who just take the obvious solution, never ask any more questions, see the obvious suspect and don’t pay attention to anything that doesn’t fit. Lazy investigating. Good initial clear-up rate, though. Shame it’s often the wrong answer and it falls down in court. Despite the paper trail.”

Castle stops drinking his wine quite as quickly as he had been and refills Beckett’s glass. He wonders how much she’d drunk with Lanie, to be this emotionally expansive. He’s seeing another aspect of her here, and he’s rapidly trying to fit it to the rest of the picture, and the file. Under all her acid, knife-edged words he can hear old pain, unhealed. He thinks he knows where this has come from: he knows – Espo told him – that Beckett’s read her mother’s file. (but he hasn’t understood the significance, hasn’t thought what that might mean in the context of her overachieving personality) He can’t believe that such a perfectionist cop wouldn’t have spotted that the investigation was somewhat sketchy. His desire to solve that mystery is bolstered. Ostensibly, it’s to prove he’s good enough, clever enough, just - enough. Underneath, he doesn’t at all like that descant of hurt. When he solves the case it’ll go away. He realises that his hand has crept across the table almost far enough to lie over Beckett’s and pulls it back rapidly before she notices and breaks his fingers. This isn’t about comfort, it’s about finding the story. Just as he’s got his hand back to safety, she slams down all her shutters again.

“So 1PP spends its time inventing new forms to try to up the conviction rate, and we spend our time trying to fill them in. Just like Dilbert, Castle, without the cubicles.” She produces a very impressive effort at a sardonic smile. The gnocco is, however, still circuit-training round the plate, belying her calm face and voice. Suddenly, it seems, she realises what she’s doing, puts her cutlery neatly together and sits back with her glass in hand. Her eyes give away nothing, her hand doesn’t tremble, her expression is bland. There’s nothing at all to indicate that this subject might have had a personal connection.

“It’s very boring,” Castle notes. “I don’t want to have to write lots about Nikki filling in paperwork. That won’t sell.”

Beckett regards him with cynical amusement. “Just because we have to do it doesn’t mean you have to write about it. You certainly don’t have to sit around and watch. It doesn’t help us do it any faster.” Castle isn’t sure how to take that. It’s not – quite – a request that he stay away if he’s not asked to attend at a new case. It’s certainly not encouragement or a statement that he makes the day less boring. On the other hand, he got away with – no he didn’t. “And I want you to change the name. Nikki Heat is still a stripper name, not a cop name.” She looks thoroughly pained. “What do you think it’s going to do when everyone knows you’re basing this fictional cop on me and calling her Nikki Heat? Do you _want_ me to be a laughingstock? Is that the plan, Castle?” Pained is rapidly becoming insulted.

“No. But you have to choose a name that attracts readers. One that gives good titles. Storm did, and Heat will. You don’t mind the Nikki bit, you’re just objecting to Heat.” Much as he would like to say _and if you weren’t so hot it wouldn’t be nearly as accurate_ he doesn’t feel that getting slapped would improve the evening. “Heat gives me all sorts of options for titles,” he smirks. “Heat Wave. Summer Heat. Packing Heat. Et cetera.” Beckett looks absolutely disgusted.

“Is that it? All your comments about artistic integrity and how you need to do all your research so the books are accurate and actually it comes down to choosing a name that will boost your sales? Is that all that matters?”

Castle looks – and indeed is – wounded. “No. But when I write a good book I want people to read it. And if you don’t have an attractive title and cover it doesn’t sell. People don’t buy it unless something catches their eye, and obviously if they don’t buy they don’t read.” He thinks about that for a second. “Well, I hope that they buy before they read. Piracy isn’t helpful.”

Beckett looks marginally less disgusted by the serious answer, though not much comforted. “I still don’t think it’s a good name.” She has a thought, fuelled by the wine. “What are you calling Ryan and Esposito? Bet you’re not giving them male stripper names.”

Castle grins happily. “I haven’t quite worked it out, but combined they’re pretty ubiquitous, aren’t they.” Unwillingly, Beckett’s lips quirk up in an answering grin. “So I thought – well, what’s ubiquitous?” Beckett’s grin widens. “And then I thought… roaches are ubiquitous.” She sniggers, then full-out laughs.

“Roach? You’re going to find two names that you can combine to make “roach”? Seriously?” Castle sniggers in his turn.

“Yep. So while you’re complaining about Nikki Heat, just remember that I could have called her Roach. Or Rat. Or even Pigeon.”

“Not Pigeon. Please, not Pigeon.” She’s still laughing at the thought, annoyance and upset gone as if they had never been.

“Aww, really? I was just beginning to think that it would make a better surname. You know, titles could be…um… Passenger Pigeon. Or Homing Pigeon? How about Carrier Pigeon?”

“That would make her sound like a shopping trolley. Or one of those food carts on airplanes.”

Castle sniggers happily again. Suddenly it’s all friends and good humour. He likes this. He _really_ likes this: someone who’ll joke with him as if none of it really matters, no agenda. He doesn’t need to pretend about what he’s writing or put up a façade to hide writer’s block. Not that he’s suffered from that since the day Beckett stormed into his party and hauled him off for questioning.   But this is really, really nice. Someone who catches his mental curve balls and throws them back with a different spin, confidently expecting him to pick them out the air and pitch them back in his turn. He can’t remember the last time he met anyone who could do that, still less appeared to be enjoying it as they did. Being with Beckett is certainly never boring, and while he can’t even begin to pretend to himself that their more… intimate… moments aren’t _exactly_ the edgy, hot, definitely-not-plain-vanilla relationship that he hasn’t found for some time (well, relationship may not – yet – be the word, but it will be); he also likes catching killers, the banter and focus in the bullpen, and the sense that the cops in the Twelfth (these ones, anyway) could be proper friends, not toadies or hangers-on or parasites.

“D’you want dessert? Or coffee – oh, I don’t need to ask that, do I? Do you ever _not_ want coffee? But they have really good desserts here. There’s a chocolate terrine…” He lets that lie suggestively between them. He’s fairly sure that chocolate appeals to Beckett; almost as much as coffee.

“Okay.” And sure enough she goes for the chocolate. And coffee, of course. He notes that it’s a latte. Tomorrow, when he puts proper coffees from his machine on her desk, it will be lattes. Today had been plain Americano. He’ll still addict her to his coffee, and now she’s in a much better mood he also thinks that he can take her home – well, he can request that he accompanies her, carefully not treading on the toes of her absolute abhorrence of any sort of indication that she can’t protect herself. He can learn. Oh yes, he can learn her likes and dislikes.

Dessert and coffee duly arrive. Beckett has finally relaxed, as much as she ever has, under the influence of a reasonable quantity of wine. Castle thinks vaguely that she must have the alcohol tolerance of a small oil tanker, because her speech and thinking haven’t slowed at all. She’s even being sociable: happy to argue about movies or restaurants. But finally dinner is done.

Castle takes care of the check, despite Beckett’s best attempts to go Dutch.

“I invited you, Beckett.” He assesses her pride.   “You can take me out next time.” He nearly falls over with amazement when she agrees. He’s not at all sure that she knows what she’s agreed to. But he’ll not let on that she’s just accepted a third date. She might, after all, change her mind. She’s changed it, he thinks, several times already throughout dinner.

Beckett is considering the evening. After an extremely sticky start, it had actually been fun. Trading ever-sillier character names and suggestions, and then light conversation, for once not involving death, had been very enjoyable. (Building theory is also very enjoyable, she thinks. But she needs to stop dealing with death every moment she’s awake.) And Castle hadn’t once tried to imply, or even done so accidentally, that his knowledge or experience or wealth outweighed the value of her thoughts. She thinks back to her decisions over the weekend and the last couple of days, and Lanie’s trenchant comments.

“I need to get home. Wanna hitch a ride, Castle?” She’s not sure what she wants, or how much of it is the result of more wine in one night than she’d normally have in a week. Every time she decides what she wants, something changes her view. She’s behaving like a ditsy teen: _do I, don’t I; will I, won’t I_. She hasn’t realised that the reason underlying her changeability is that she’s scared of what she might be falling into.

Castle manages not to react by sheer force of will. Reaction, in this case, being a growl of undiluted desire and quite possibly showing her just how much he’d like to share a lot more than a cab. But… if Beckett’s asking him to share then just possibly Beckett’s got more plans for the rest of the evening than them going their separate ways. Unlikely, but still… in the dark, quiet rear of a cab a lot could be intimated without disturbing the driver.

“Sure. Thank you.” And he is very, very careful not to make any smartass comments that might spoil the possibilities that are becoming just a little less unlikely.

When a cab pulls to a stop after a moment or two and Castle opens the door for her Beckett automatically steps in and misses the address that he gives the driver. She assumes that since he’s given the address, he’ll get dropped off and then she’ll go on home. She doesn’t realise she’s wrong for a few minutes. The route from dinner to her own apartment or to SoHo wouldn’t be that different, initially. And then it becomes obvious that the cab is going to hers first. About that point, she starts to become suspicious of Castle’s plans. A couple of instants later, she adds deep suspicion of his motives in taking up her offer of a cab share in the first place. It belatedly occurs to her that offering him a ride was not perhaps the best idea she could have had, if she doesn’t want him tonight.

“I thought that you were getting out first?”

“No, ladies first.” His voice is deeper, warmer, than in the precinct trading theories or than it had generally been over dinner. It eases gently into her mind and tucks in alongside certain nerves. “Your apartment is nearer the restaurant,” – Beckett is fairly sure that isn’t true - “why would I be dropped off first?” He smiles annoyingly. “I’m sure I’ll survive the night-time journey from yours to mine.”

“Why are you sharing a cab anyway?” She manages to impute a considerable sting of her previous irritation into that. “Shouldn’t you have got one of your own? You don’t live round here.”

“You asked me. And I wanted company. It’s boring on my own. I like having someone to talk to.” His voice is dropping all the time, slipping softly into an intimate murmur that she has to lean towards him to hear over the rattle of the taxi. She knows what he’s doing. It’s not that subtle. “I like talking to you.”

“Yes, I’d noticed. Though I thought you just liked talking. You do enough of it.”

“I’m wounded. Don’t you appreciate my words?” He drops his voice further. “You appreciated them the other night.” Somehow his fingers have migrated to her hand and are gently circling on her skin. The featherlight stroking is reminding her of other touches, in other places. She doesn’t pull her hand away as quickly as she might have. And when she does, she realises the rookie mistake she’s just made. Why she’d thought pulling her hand away would have meant that Castle would return his hand to his own side of the cab, she has no idea. He never does anything she wants. Well, in public, anyway. Now his fingers are circling gently against her leg.

“That’s not appropriate.” She says it coolly. But it’s rather difficult for him to believe in prunes and prisms Beckett any more, now he knows what she wears – _off-duty_ , as it were. _Game on._

“I think it’s very appropriate.” He’s hit his full bedroom voice. The atmosphere in this close, confined, claustrophobic cab turns private, intimate. Unacknowledged dark desires stalk the shifting shadows thrown by the streetlights. His treacle-smooth baritone pours softly through the suddenly sultry air, insinuates itself around her in the way she’s sure the man himself intends to do; cocooning any vestiges of common sense out of her way. His fingers draw their slow circles a little higher, a little hotter; pressing their point.


	19. Let me entertain you

Castle sees Beckett beginning to bite her lip.  She’s not pulling away or pushing him away or mutilating him or shooting him.  _She wants this_.  He doesn’t change his tempo, or the location: close enough to tantalise, far enough to tease.  By the time they reach her apartment he’ll have stoked her to flashpoint.  This time, he’s going to be in control of affairs from the beginning.  He’ll learn what she wants; interrogate her in ever more pleasurable ways, and she’ll tell him more of what bad-girl Beckett likes.  He’d originally thought, right back when he first saw her, that she might be adventurous.  Now he’s only wondering how far adventurous might go.  Because he’s perfectly prepared to go as far as she wants.

The cab is close to pulling up at Beckett’s apartment.  She’s desperately trying not to squirm, hot and frustrated and damp, when Castle leans in even closer and breathes seductively across her ear.

“Not wearing stockings today, Beckett?”  His tongue flicks over her earlobe.  She feels her whole body tighten.  “That’s no…fun.  I’ve been imagining you in them ever since our first date.  Do you know what you look like in nothing but black lace and stockings?”

“That’s not appropriate.  And it wasn’t a date,” she says, again.  She can’t think when he’s stroking her thigh and whispering dark, sexy thoughts in her ear in that soft-as-sin baritone.  All she can think of, when he’s doing that, is those other nights and what else he did and she did and they did.  It’s not helping her calm down at all.  There’s heat building between her legs.  If she’s going to stop him, this is her opportunity.  If she’s going to send him home, she needs to speak now. 

She says absolutely nothing.  She’ll let him come up, she’s decided she wants him to come up, but she won’t just fall at his feet, she’s going to play with his head first.  Let’s see if he’s prepared to push for what he so very clearly wants, if he’s capable of putting a little effort in.  She’s sure that he never has to make any effort at all.  Well, if he wants her, he’s going to have to.  

“They seemed very appropriate.  Who’d have thought that the perfectly proper Detective Beckett in her perfectly prim and proper pants and button downs could dress like that for dinner, and wear lingerie like that underneath?”  He’ll seduce her with words, before he ever gets to touch.  “What might I find under your precinct garb if I unbuttoned you now?  Is the cream you let me have a glimpse of as sexy as the crimson you wore when you came to me?”  _Not, Beckett, to my loft.  To me._   He hears her breath hitching and lets his own hunger show, just as the taxi stops.  He holds its door for Beckett, throws a suitable bill at the driver and turns back to her just in time to ensure that he’s not left standing outside the closing door.  She hasn’t waited for him at all.  _Not nice, Beckett.  Not nice at all.  You’ll pay for that._   She’ll enjoy how she pays for that.

“Thought you were going home, Castle.  What’s this?”

“Seeing you home.  That’s what a gentleman does, Beckett.  I’m sure I’ve explained that before.”

Silly Beckett, thinking that he won’t come up, he muses – and stops hard.  That was almost affectionate.  He’s not going there.  Affection is far too close to other emotions that he’s not up for.  Not required, not wanted, not helpful.  It won’t help him cure his obsession: it won’t lessen his desire.  The only thing that will do that is catching, and keeping, Beckett, till they’re – he’s – done.

Anyway.  Why on earth would she think that he’s going home right now?  He’d never said  _when_ he was going home.  He follows her to the elevator, just a little too close for comfort; leans against the wall, just a little too large for the space available; slides his gaze up and down her, just a little too slowly to let her pretend she doesn’t notice; follows her out the elevator at the other end.  When she pulls out her keys he grasps her waist and turns her back around to face him.

“Okay, Castle, you’ve seen me home.  Your membership of the league of gentlemen remains intact.”  And that’s back to the normal spark.  On the other hand, it’s not a command that he go home, simply a comment on the current situation.  Since he doesn’t want to go home yet, he won’t take it like that.

“Not quite.  You haven’t got safely into your apartment yet.  Who knows, you might be abducted from outside your own front door.  I can’t allow that to happen.”  He’s still using the deep timbre of seduction.

She looks completely disbelieving, along with the familiar annoyance.  Good.  The more annoyed she is, the more likely she’ll just react, just like previously.  Feel.  Not think.  He’ll do the thinking, should any be required, tonight.  He doesn’t believe it will be.  He’ll worry about what he’s learned later, when he can process it properly, fit it into the Beckett story and use it to solve the mystery of her mother.  That’s where he needs to direct his thinking: where it will do most good: working out the story.

He doesn’t think about the earlier times that working out the story got him in trouble.  Not now.  Not any more.  ( _Don’t you ever say that again, Ricky.  Don’t ever tell that story to anyone._ )  But then Beckett turns back to the door and opens it.  He follows her inside, too.

“Castle, I’m home.  I’m inside.  I’m okay.  You don’t have to stay.”  The snap is still in her voice.  “You don’t need to see me in the door.  This building has security, in case you didn’t notice, and I have a gun.”  She slips off her coat, toes off her heels in what looks to him like an automatic _hey-honey-I’m-home_ gesture, unclips her gun and holster from her belt and puts it away in what looks like a small safe.  That’s an automatic end-of-day move, too.  And now she can’t shoot him, which is something of a relief.  Her suppressed and not-so-suppressed anger, constantly just below the surface, ready to erupt at the slightest check, not often enough mixed with raw arousal, does not incline him to think that he’s safe around her.  But she still hasn’t told him to go, and she’s fast enough to tell him to go or to make her point clear by leaving herself if she doesn’t want him there.  He smiles inwardly.  He’s not going anywhere until she tells him to.

He’ll need to ask about gun storage – more research – but not, emphatically not, now.  He’s got other questions to ask now.  She’s stepping back towards the door where he’s lurking, sure that if she means him to leave her ingrained manners will defeat the flare of irritation and force her back here to see him out politely.  Bring her into range.  He doesn’t think this will work again.  He’s used her own annoyance and arousal and consequent proximity against her twice: this will be three times now, and he’s sure that she’ll be alert for it before another time can succeed.  But here and now he thinks she’s a little tired, her thinking a little sloppy from the wine, and his urgent need simply to _get her back_ , to show her that she should give in to him, be with him, is not ameliorated by either of those considerations in any way.

“I _said_ , you don’t have to stay.  I’m perfectly okay,” she repeats, stopping just out of reach.  He’s invading her space, though, running his regard over her with darkened eyes and more than a hint of hunger; reminding her of the hot hard night that had matched and then surpassed her dreams.  She knows he can give her what she wants, needs.  He isn’t exactly taking any steps to leave.  She isn’t asking him to. 

“But what if I want to?”  Now he looks and sounds plaintive, little-boy pleading, so very much not the predatory expression she was expecting that she pauses.  She almost, almost feels sorry for how she’s playing him.  Until she takes a closer look and realises that he’s simply putting it on.  Acting.  She frowns, tending towards a scowl.

“Very cute, Castle.  Making fake puppy eyes at me won’t work.”  He looks hurt, and when that, too, doesn’t work gives up and reverts to a slow, sensual smile.

“It was worth a try.”

“Why are you here?”  Which is still not _I want you to leave_.

She might be thinking a little sloppily, but, Castle realises, that has the forceful snap of interrogation behind it _and_ she hasn’t come any closer.  But under it there’s something quite different: seduction.  _Ohh, Beckett.  Let’s play_.  She’s too clever, she’s guessed his game, his aim, and she’s playing him.  He’s going to kiss the cleverness right out her head; leave her dazed and desperate and ready for him.  She’ll keep him from being bored, for a while; keep him from being scared that he can’t write well enough to satisfy his fans, his publisher, himself: because while he’s around her the story is right there, and he can go to his laptop any time he pleases and let it flow from his mind out through his fingers, confident that it’s right, it’s good. 

He buries the memory of the twist of his gut when he thought she’d walked away: the thin cold edge of terror that he wasn’t enough for her; that in losing her he’d lost his inspiration.  He’ll _be_ enough for her: intelligent enough, masculine enough, satisfying enough.  She reads his books, their minds mesh, she fires under his hands, his mouth, his body: he must be enough.  But under it all is the fear that she sees right through the façade, sees that he’s not the brash, successful, confident star that the world expects.  If she’ll respect him and want him and need him, then maybe he is that man: maybe he is, can be, more.  He’ll show her, and everyone else at the precinct, that he’s valuable; that he can be, should be, part of the team; that there’s a place for him; that he’s not a nuisance, getting in the way of more important people with more important work and goals.  ( _Stop getting in the way of the grown-ups, Ricky, we’re busy, go read out the way somewhere_ , says a little voice in the back of his mind. He ignores it, in the same way he ignores all of those voices.)  He’s been useful, already, by providing his intelligence.  He’s a respected person now.  He’ll use both intelligence and respect – of his contacts - to get her the answers she couldn’t find for herself, and then she’ll see how valuable he is.

She knows why he’s here.  It’s precisely why she wants him here.  He’s crowding her, not physically – yet – but having dropped the act, he’s filling up her apartment with danger and heat and that promise of something darker, edgier.  He’s still too big, though.  She’s trying to ignore that, but it’s a bit difficult to ignore right now, while he’s deliberately looming, leaning intimidatingly against the wall, surveying her from head to foot.  It’s having exactly the effect he would want.

“You know why I’m here.”  It’s not a question at all.  “You know what I want.”  He could hardly, now, have made it clearer.  He still wants her, and he’s prepared to be more than a little assertive about it.  The suggestive, murmurous tone is squirming into her nerves and he’s very, very close.  “It’s what you want too, Beckett.”  She’s not going to comment on that.  (But he’s right.  Oh yes.)

“I thought” – she raises a brow as if to negate the suggestion that he thinks - “you might want a goodnight kiss.  Seeing as this is our second date and all.”  And since, like the mountain and Muhammad, she won’t come to him, he takes the two rapid steps that are all that are necessary to reach her, tugs her into his arms, discovering with silky delight that without heels she tucks very neatly against his shoulder, smaller and more delicate without the height and power the shoes give her.  He tips her chin up to give himself easy access to her mouth and bends his head.  “And you can have it.”  He pauses, a whisper away from her mouth.  “Just as soon as you like.”  He leans in the last breath and kisses her.

Just like last time at her apartment, she instantly opens to his demanding lips, his searching, hungry tongue; receptive and so very responsive under his hard, hot kiss.  Just like last time, with no considerations of his family to stop him, it’s all flaring into that explosive, instant need: hard against soft, push against pull: he wants her to be naked and wet and writhing for him _right now_.  But _unlike_ the last time he was here, he manages to retain just enough control not to start stripping her clothes off and shoving her against the door and taking her right here right now.  Because this time he’s going to take it slow.  Take her slow.  By the time he’s finished she’ll be screaming, hot and soaked and pinned beneath him; begging, tight and shattering around him.  Oh yes.  The predatory big-cat that’s his desire to have her, own her, stretches out its massive limbs within him.

He presses her close, tight into him with one wide palm across the curve of her ass, the other cupping the nape of her neck, letting her feel the promise implicit in the force of his hard body, in the way he’s holding her to restrict her movement, stop her taking what she wants.  He knows what she wants, she wants to arch against him, bring her leg around his waist and open to him and grind in.  And she’ll be allowed to, but not yet.  This is not going to be the same frantic uncontrolled flames and desperation as before.  This is not going to incinerate his control.  This is going to be a slow, deliberate rise in temperature: heating the water so slowly the frog doesn’t understand it’s being boiled.  So that the Detective doesn’t detect she’s being caught; so she doesn’t spot her addiction.  She won’t be leaving him any time soon.  She won’t be leaving him at all.  No-one leaves him. Not any more.

He turns them round and pins her to the door with the weight of his body, his feet outside hers, keeping her from opening against him, not letting her have the pressure and friction where she wants it.  She can’t push him back, free her leg, though she tries.  One hand stays behind her head, holding her into his slow, searching exploration of her mouth, and, when he’s finished there for now, turning her head so that he can kiss around her neck and behind her ear and nip her earlobe and find the spot which makes her emit a sobbing little gasp.  He hears it with satisfaction, and does it again.  His other hand slides slowly over her hip, up her side, not touching where he _knows_ she wants him to, sliding the cotton of her shirt from side to side so it rubs over her breasts and causes her to draw in breath, so it loosens the bottom of the shirt from the waistband of her pants.  He flicks the top button open, widens the vee at her neck, strokes down just hard enough that she’ll know his intentions.  Her hands are gripping on his shoulders, sharp nails already biting through the light fabric of his shirt.  She’ll scratch and claw, and then she’ll purr.  He’ll make her purr, again.

He slides his hand back down to her waist and carefully undoes her belt, pulls the leather free of the buckle, the belt from its loops; and skims wickedly light fingers across the satin skin and tight muscle under her shirt at her waist, dipping just fractionally below the waistband and making her gasp and try to roll against his hand and hips again.  He doesn’t let her.  He’s got this.  He can preserve his own control and destroy Beckett’s.  And then he’ll know he’s still in charge of this situation, that his own feelings won’t lead him to be that other man.  He’ll still be desired, still be in control, still be everybody’s favourite man.  ( _I’m going with Ted, Ricky.  Not you._ )  Even Beckett’s.  Just like he ought to be.  She’s going to be his, just like _she_ ought to be.

He undoes the next button, and traces along the thin edge of cream lace that it reveals.  Beckett shivers under the gentle touch, and brings her hand off his shoulder and over his collarbone, unbuttoning on her own account.  If he’s going to start that, then she’s going to play too.  She slips her fingers under his shirt and downward, scraping against the firm muscle, stroking lightly over Castle’s nipples.  He gasps and jerks into her, regains his balance by half-stepping back, and she takes the sudden opportunity presented to escape the way he’d been preventing her stretching around him, stopping her placing him where she wanted.  She widens her stance before he has a chance to work out what she’s doing; grasps his belt and pulls him hard to try and bring him into her.  He doesn’t shift an inch towards her.  She tries again, with as little result.

“Something you want, Beckett?  Or should that be _someone_?”  He grins, the hand that was behind her head now holding her easily against the door so she can’t step forward.  He takes the opportunity to undo a third button, and looks admiringly at the edge of cream satin and lace he’s revealed.  “Still pretty.  I like it.”  He draws a finger down the centre line of her cleavage, and she wriggles.

“I didn’t put it on to please you.”  Her voice says _I wouldn’t lift a finger to please you_.

“No?”  The tone is disbelieving.  She doesn’t turn a hair.  “No.  You wear lingerie like that to please yourself, don’t you?  Oh, Detective Beckett.  What else are you hiding under your formal shirts and dress pants?”  He flicks the remaining two buttons open in quick succession; fast definitive movements making his certainty about the outcome clear; pulls it wide open and devours her with his eyes.  The coy cream satin is just as sexy as the black, hot-as-hell lace or the deep crimson silk had been; sends heat surging through him.  Suddenly it’s not just a game any more; suddenly his control is all slipping away.  His hands turn hard and possessive, pulling her against him, tugging her to the bedroom, pushing her down on the bed, leaning over her – stopping.  He has to ask.  Because he’s not that man.

“Is this what you want, Beckett?”  The words are drawled out in the deep molasses sexy tone that goes straight to her core; a teasing, arousing question designed to elicit the answer _yes_ , to draw her into admitting her acceptance of his control of the game.  But under it Beckett hears something very different.  She may be half out her mind with arousal but there’s a note there that tells her that there’s a real question, a real choice.  And if she says _no_ , he’ll stop.  No question.  She can trust that: she knows that.  And under that again, only just discernible, is something else, that she’ll think about later.  When her mind isn’t screaming at her to switch off, stop analysing, stop fighting, give in to sensation.  He’s so very, very good at sensation.  But she’s got game.  She can’t just concede control.

“You think I couldn’t shoot you if it wasn’t?  Or that I let anyone do anything I don’t want?”  She smiles very slowly and very wickedly, flexes just a little so that the shirt falls away from her ribs.

“I think you don’t let anyone do anything for you, whether you need it or not.”  She doesn’t have a chance to catch that thought before it’s lost in his next words.  “But I’m sure you won’t shoot me, because I think I’m the only person you’re allowing to see this.  I think I’m the only person you’ll allow to have this.  No-one else gets to do this.  You’re _my_ badass detective, Beckett.  All mine.  Only mine.”  He’s deliberately possessive, deliberately laying down the way he wants it to be, and he sees her eyes turn hazy with arousal as he claims her with his words.  He draws a firm hand down between her breasts, and watches her chest rise and fall faster under the satin as he moves it lower and lower.


	20. Let's get physical

When he reaches her waist he stops again, this time simply to tease.  She growls at him, brings her own hands round to unbutton the rest of Castle’s shirt, his belt, his pants, somewhere along the way he’s lost his shoes.… at least, undoing him was the plan.  Somehow he’s just out of reach, and when she tries to sit up it’s not happening.  Heat stokes a little higher, arousal builds a little darker, as she realises that without exerting any great effort Castle is holding her just the way he wants to.  She might be wide open to his hands, but she can’t reach him to return the compliment.  She puts some more effort into it, not willing to accept that he should be able to impose his will on her; not willing to submit to his strength without putting up a fight.  She shifts suddenly to one side, out from under his hand, grips his wrist and levers herself to sitting, twists his arm and pushes down hard so he’s sprawled across the bed.  That’s better.  He looks up at her, grins lazily, infinitely sure of himself, infinitely seductive.

“Do you want to play rough, then, Beckett?”  He moves faster than she’d thought a big man could, grabs her and pulls her on top of him, and while she’s trying to break his hold and bring a knee up to prove a point he rolls them over and suddenly it’s just like in the gym again, heavy weight pinning her down and spreading her legs and it’s her turn to smile slowly because now she’s got what she wanted and this time she doesn’t hesitate to arch up and rub against him. 

“Trying to cheat?  Playing dirty?  We can’t have that.”  It’s deep and dark and slow and temptation incarnate.  Beckett feels the silky voice stroke along the inside of her skin and squirms in response against Castle’s still-clothed body.  His eyes are dark and dilated and he looks at her as if he’s the apex predator and she’s prey.  Her lips open without her conscious volition, reacting to the bad-boy voice and the position and the hint of something darker in his words.

“I thought you wanted to play… dirty.”  She smiles wickedly and quite deliberately licks her lips.  He hisses, but doesn’t react further.

“Cheating won’t get you what you want, Beckett.  We’ll get to playing dirty in good time.” He slides down so that she can’t get friction, tall enough that his face is still over hers, his lips above her mouth, leaning on his elbows.  “Cheating has… consequences.”  He invades her mouth, taking and claiming and conquering and possessing till she moans into him and lets him own it; then takes her wrists into one hand, holding them in front of her, and sits back on his heels. 

Castle is exerting an immense amount of self-control not to lose himself completely, strip Beckett without a pause and take her here and now.  She’d like it, too, fast and rough; but he’s going to show her that there’s more to it than hot hard sex.  There’s slow, drugging, passion too.  He’ll show her both, possession cut by careful consideration of all the different variations they can try; though consideration of any kind has very little to do with anything at present.  He had a plan, and effecting it means keeping control.  His own, and of the remains of the evening.  He pops the button on Beckett’s pants, unzips them, watches the contraction in her abs as she starts to sit up and uses the hand holding her wrists to push her very gently back down again. 

“Told you, cheating has consequences.  Stay there.”  The lazy, predatory grin is still very firmly present.  He can see the intrigue, anticipation, starting to bloom on her face, but she doesn’t stop fighting him for control of the game, trying to free her hands.  He wonders if she’ll stop fighting him, eventually; if she’ll accede for tonight.  He has no illusions about how long _accede_ might last.  Approximately till she wakes up tomorrow, he thinks.  If _accede_ ever begins.  _Concede_ likely never will.  Time to stop thinking irrelevant thoughts and start on some very relevant actions.

Castle lets go of Beckett’s hands and, before she can take any precipitate actions, shoves her shirt halfway down her arms and, while she’s trying to disentangle herself, moves to one side, whisks off her pants in one practised gesture, shifts back to his original position, and leaves her in only her underwear and the open shirt which she’s trying to escape.  Then he simply stays where he is and watches as she emerges from the tangle of sleeves and shirt-tails.

He’s content just to look at her, his dark blue eyes intent and focused, a half-smile.  His gaze runs up and down her skin, noting the soft sheen of slight sweat, the push of her breasts and erect nipples against her bra, the results of his possession.  Dark satisfaction stretches out within him.  There’ll be other results, later, memories of the pleasure he’ll give her, reminding her how he’ll have owned her.  Not where anyone else can see.  It’s she who needs to know she’s his, not anyone else.  Lying in front of him, laid out like a courtesan for his delectation, waiting, she’s exactly what he wants.  And now he has her.  ( _You thought that every other time, too.  Except you didn’t have her_.)  He pushes the fragment of insecurity away, and runs lazy hands up from her ankles, unhurriedly, trailing his fingers tantalisingly close, but not close enough.

“What do you want, Beckett?”  Her eyes are hooded, lashes down against damask cheeks, hiding her thoughts.  “This?”  He slides his fingers up over her stomach and palms her breasts, sliding soft fabric this way and that.  She squirms under the touch, reaches for him.  “Uh-uh.  You cheated.”

“I did not.”  She smiles tauntingly.  “If you can’t handle it…”  It’s too much.  He holds her hips down and leans in and blows very gently across her.

“I’ll handle you, Beckett.  Oh yes.”  He runs his tongue over the satin and she jerks under his grip.  “I think you like that.”  He does it again, slowly, as if he’s tasting her on the fabric, and she feels him smirk as she writhes, stubble scraping against her.  “I _know_ you like that.”  The next time she gasps.  He continues to tease, never touching except through her panties.  Shortly, she’s moaning, and he’s holding her firmly enough that there might be fingermarks on her hips tomorrow, if she moves much more.  It feels so _good_ , to be held so tight.  She slides her hands into Castle’s hair to hold him in place.

Which is when he stops, lifting his head to gaze up her body with his trademark infuriating smirk smeared across his face.  That’s not nice.  Well, if he won’t play nice, she’ll take matters into her own hands.  So to speak.  She starts to pull away and sit up.

“What’re you doing, Beckett?”  He tugs at a nicely-judged angle and she ends up flat on her back again.  He grins ferally.  “Down you go.”

“If you hadn’t stopped going down” – there’s an appreciative snicker – “then that wouldn’t have happened.”

“I keep telling you,” Castle says in a long-sufferingly patient tone, “cheating has consequences.  Today’s consequence is that I get to set the pace.  That means you don’t get to.”  His tone conveys his complete assumption of her obedience within the game.

“Or I get to throw you out and attend to business myself.”

“No, I don’t think so.  Who beat whom at sparring?”  There’s a significant pause.

“You think you can take me?”  She realises her mistake just as he opens his mouth.

“Oh, Beckett.  I _know_ I can take you.”  He doesn’t take his eyes off her face as he runs large fingers delicately over her panties, pausing at physiologically significant points to play.  When her body relaxes he lowers his head again, nips at her thigh and hears the answering gasp; trails his mouth across the soaked satin and repeats the soft bite on the other side.  “You’ll _beg_ me to take you.”  He goes back to letting his fingers play, slipping under the material, running through her folds, circling, dipping, never close enough or firm enough or deep enough to give her what she wants, until her breathing speeds up and acquires an edge of moan, until she pushes against his hand.

“You like that.  And you like this.”  He finally slips a finger into her and she bucks into it; whimpers as he withdraws it, proving his point.  He slides up next to her and leans over to kiss her deeply.  She shivers, and he wraps her in and kisses her some more, slowly demonstrating how he can wind her up without anything more than leisurely possessive kisses and holding her in tight in strong arms against hard muscle and hot weight.  She feels so very right, up close and personal like this; she fits so very well against him.

Beckett retains, with some difficulty, enough awareness to realise that Castle is back to petting her into acquiescence rather than succumbing to his own previously uncontrolled need.  Oh no.  No way.  She extricates one hand and sets about changing the balance, stroking down his body, finishing unbuttoning his shirt, unbuckling his belt;  until she can manoeuvre her fingers between them and open his zip, palm across the hard bulge and when he jerks slip her hand into the slit in his boxers and set about removing any idea that he might have of _setting the pace_.  If he thinks that she’ll just let him reduce her to a melted mess as and when – and how – he pleases, without needing to try, then he’s wrong.  Giving up control does not, to her mind, mean complete, unsought, surrender.  She angles her fingertips carefully and glides softly downward, teasing with the tips of her nails; tracing him just hard enough to lend an edge of danger; to impart the knowledge that he’s – not so metaphorically – wholly in her hands. 

His reaction is instant: the leisurely kiss turns hard, hungry; his hands clench around her waist and at the back of her neck; he rolls over, taking her from beside him to beneath him in one motion, settling in the niche of her thighs and trapping her hand between them.  If she strokes him now, she’ll be stroking herself too.  She’s flicked his switch, closed the circuit and electrocuted his control.  He leaves any concept of _slow_ behind, takes his hand from her neck to undo her bra.  He needs her to be naked.  He needs to be naked.  Just that instant of intimately delicate, scraped touch has shocked him into the explosive desire that left him stripping her and taking her against her own door; left him breaking all his own house rules; leaves him completely incapable of slowing or stopping or anything other than taking total possession of every inch of her body.  And then she does it again: curls her fingers and strokes from base to tip and feathers her thumb across the resulting moisture and she moves against her own hand and he is not having that because she should be moving to _his_ touch not her own and he reaches down and takes her fingers away.

She fights it, of course.  She tugs against his grip and, when that fails, tries to grind against him and distract him that way; but further arousing as that is it doesn’t make him let go of her hands until there’s no chance that she can sneak them back; till he’s settled tightly against her.  Instead she pulls at his shirt until it untucks and opens, leaving them close enough to skin to skin that response flares and suddenly Castle’s got no shirt and Beckett’s bra has disappeared and he’s kissing her frantically while holding her into him with one hand and trying to finish stripping her and himself with the other because he just plain needs her naked under him now.  And then, finally, he has her, with one push seated deep within her heat, as close as he can get; she’s gripping his back as if she’ll never let go, and they start to move together till the world falls away.

It happened again, he thinks raggedly.  He’d meant to reduce her to wreckage and stay whole himself and yet again he couldn’t stop it all exploding.  He lies back, spent; keeps Beckett bound in beside him.  When he’s capable of movement he still doesn’t release her.  She stretches, wriggles a little into the pillows, relaxes and turns on to her side, away from him.  It feels like she’s rebuilt a barrier.

“Don’t go away.”

“Mmm?”  She’s sleepy from wine and sex.  “Not going anywhere.”  Some consciousness re-activates, briefly.  “This is my bed.  It’s you who’ll leave.”  She quietens again, snuggling into her comforter.  Castle stares into the ceiling, hoping some writing will appear on it which it might make that last comment a little clearer.  He doesn’t necessarily like the implication that she expects him to leave.  Now?  Eventually?  At the end of the affair?  She shouldn’t expect him to leave, she should try to make him stay.  But it didn’t sound like she would.

“How d’you mean, it’s me who’ll leave?”

Beckett rolls over under her comforter and looks blearily at him.  “My apartment.  You won’t stay here.  You’ll go home to your loft.  Not a problem.”  She shuts her eyes by way of punctuation.

Not a problem?  _Not a problem_?  She’s supposed to want him.  She’s supposed to be addicted.  How can it be _not a problem_ that he’ll go home, leave her?  He wasn’t even planning to go home.  Certainly not yet.  His mother’s home tonight, so he needn’t go except to be back for breakfast.  Except Beckett doesn’t seem to care either way.  He feels the same sharp slice of pain that he’d suffered in the precinct when she’d told him she was _just scratching an itch_.  He’s forgotten that sleepovers are, apparently, for grade-schoolers.

“I don’t have to go.”  He doesn’t hear the neediness in his voice, the implied question, _don’t you want me to stay?_   Half-asleep, Beckett doesn’t consciously pick it up either.

“ ‘Kay then.” But there’s no emotion worth mentioning in that reply, as if she’s indifferent, uncaring.  Hurt gnaws again, needle-toothed in his gut.  Does she really not care, either way?  She will care.  She has to care.  He’ll make her care, right now; and later, when he solves her case for her.  He pulls the comforter away to reveal her and drops it over the side of the bed.  Her eyes snap open, instant wakefulness.

“What’d you do that for?  It’s cold.  Give me it back.”  She’s coming back to life unpleasantly rapidly in the cool air.  She sits up and looks about for the comforter, finally spotting it on the floor on the far side of the bed.  She pushes crossly at Castle, who’s not doing anything to move out the way and let her retrieve it so she can cuddle back down and go to sleep.  Plus or minus him.  If he doesn’t let her get the comforter back, definitely minus him, because he will be dead.  She crawls over him so she can reach down for it.

“You don’t need it.  I’ll keep you warm.”  He wraps his arms round her so she can’t get the comforter, then rolls them both to the side, keeping her tucked into his chest, facing him.  It is, she admits to herself, warm.  Rather more interestingly warm than the comforter.

“There.  I’ve got you,” he purrs quietly.  “All soft and warm and strokable” – his tone changes – “and all mine.”  He demonstrates to her just how strokable she is.  His hand insinuates itself over her hip, across her ass, pulls her in tightly on to his very evidently renewed arousal.  He’ll show her she should care.  Her leg comes up around his waist, giving him free rein to stroke, and he takes full advantage of the concession; slips fingers through the hot centre she’s made accessible until she moves demandingly against him, wet, naked and so very, very sexy; nipping at his collarbone, not able to shift further than the circumscribed freedom his grasp allows her hips.  He rolls her on to her back and stops even that limited motion: muscled thigh pressing firmly between her legs; pinioning her hands above her head; conquering her mouth and swallowing her first moan, her second; flexing hard quads against her and feeling her squirm against the roughness; driving his tongue through her opened lips till he’s sure that she _cares_ about him kissing her.  And then he takes his mouth off hers and starts to kiss round her neck to that sensitive spot by her ear so that she’ll want to move but can’t because he’s pinning her down just as she likes.  Oh, he knows she’s liking it because he can feel her trying to move more and he can hear her moaning and oh, she _will_ care about this.  About him.

He starts to draw wet patterns lower, reaching her clavicle and biting, sucking, deliberately leaving a mark.  No-one else will be able to see it.  No-one else needs to.  Further down; a brief hesitation to left, to right.  Further still, a warm wet circle around her navel, a lover’s kiss.  Furthest: spreading her out and holding her wide and small nips shading the smooth skin and this time he will bring her to begging for more and she _will_ care.  He settles in and begins to tease, to taste, to play.  This time there’s no fabric, no barrier, nothing to stop him taking her higher and higher till he’s all she’ll know.

Beckett is very definitely not cold any longer.  Quite the opposite, in fact.  Castle’s lips and teeth and tongue are trailing fire across her and _oh that feels so good_ he’s in complete control of her reactions and _don’t stop_ his tongue slips across her and into her and _please don’t stop_ he really is big enough to hold her still and she needs that and… _don’t stop!_

“Do you want this, Beckett?”  That wicked tongue flicks over her again, not quite where she wants it.  “You need to ask for it.”

“Please, Castle.”  She can barely form the words.

“Are you begging, Beckett?”  Flicker, lick, slowly in and out.  Her next utterance is simply a string of syllables with no discernible words at all.

“That’s not an answer.”  She regains breath and coherence, only because he has, quite unfairly, stopped again.

“Please.”  Deep breath. “Don’t stop.”  Another deep breath.  “Please, Castle.”

“Since you ask so nicely.”  Words and breath and thought flee. His mouth is a lethal weapon which she has no way of escaping.  Doesn’t want to escape.  She gives herself up to the moment and forgets everything in the rush of sensation, not caring that he’s caused her to lose control, rather than her giving it up; not conscious that she’s begging; and wholly unaware that she’s calling his name as she comes.

When she finally resurfaces she’s back to being tucked into Castle’s chest, head on his shoulder, held in close.  It’s the same possessive gesture, with the same odd undertone, as before.  Once might be a mistaken impression.  Twice is beginning to form a pattern.

“You’re mine, Beckett.”  She should object.  She would object, if only she had energy enough to speak.  “All mine.”  He kisses her hair, more gently than the force of his words might suggest, strokes idly over her back.  “And I’m going to keep you.”  The deep rumble is so quiet that it’s almost as if he’s talking to himself.  She’s too comfortable to object.  Time enough to correct any ideas of possessiveness later, if it should prove to be problematic.  Still, perhaps a small distraction from this line of thought would be politic.  She wriggles in a very particular way, which results in an entirely predictable answering wriggle from one particular area.  Mmmm.  She wriggles again, into a more acceptable alignment.  His next movement can’t be described as a wriggle, of any sort.  More like a… thrust.  Gentle seems to have gone for a walk.  Hard forcefulness, on the other hand, is definitely staying around.


	21. Not somebody who has seen the light

Beckett wakes in the small hours of the morning, somewhat surprised to find Castle still there, still, she notes, wrapped around her.  That’s probably what’s woken her, lack of freedom to move.  She tries to go back to sleep, but after a few moments it becomes clear that her mind has roused and sleep is not likely to return in the immediate future.  She untangles herself with extreme caution to avoid waking Castle, slips a warm robe on against the chill and pads softly to the living room, closing the door silently behind her and only switching on a small lamp by the couch.  She wants to think, undistracted.

She doesn’t understand how she got here.  Seven weeks in, she’s gone from absolute abhorrence to sleeping with him.  More than once.  _At least be honest with yourself, Kate.  You wanted him from the moment you saw him.  You just didn’t like his attitude._   She doesn’t understand his current attitude, either.  He’s spent every last moment that he’s with her ensuring she’s wholly aware of his desire; every word drips with arousal and seduction and the implication that she couldn’t possibly resist him – _and you didn’t, did you?_ – but… But.  There’s that edge of uncertainty, behind the cocky façade, and something else, that she can’t quite get a hold of, under that.  He’s been very, very careful to check that she wants it: whatever _it_ may be.  It’s all concealed in sinful, teasing tones but there’s a real choice there.  She still doesn’t understand at all why he was so horrified by his behaviour in his loft.  She’s seen, and men have attempted and failed to subject her to, a lot worse, with less apology.  And for a page six playboy who’s apparently had more casual affairs than Casanova, who could reasonably be expected to be waving goodbye after the first night, he’s exhibiting a considerable degree of possessive behaviour.  Surely that’s just part of the game, though.  She likes dominant bad boys, in bed, and certainly Castle qualifies on both counts, so he’s undoubtedly just sticking to the script.  It’s not a real feeling.

He still annoys her, though, and he’s far too keen on deciding what should happen – being him following her everywhere, including right into her bed - and manipulating events so that there’s no alternative but to go along with it.  (Except the bed part.  He’s never in any way implied she has to go along with that.) She definitely doesn’t like that.

So.  What does she like?  His intelligence: the way he thinks and theorises about her cases, letting – helping - her solve them faster.  The sex, definitely, the hard bulk and the edge of danger and the knowledge that, soon, she can go further into the forbidden than she’s been able to for a very long time because she can trust him to stop.  And she liked the silliness, the humour, the conversation of last night.

Conversely, she doesn’t like a lot of other things.  She doesn’t like being manipulated.  She doesn’t like being played.  She doesn’t like that he can make her mad so easily, take away her control of herself.  She doesn’t need to be protected, or taken care of, or suffocated.  And she very definitely will not like it if he starts trying to be possessive for real.  She doesn’t want someone around all – or even most – of the time.  She needs space.  She doesn’t want someone trying to be part of her life, delving into her past.  Been there, done that, trashed the T-shirt.  She doesn’t want a relationship.  She’s quite happy to be half out the door.  The only door she needs to walk through is the one with the corpse behind it.

She ponders for a while, alone in the small puddle of soft light.  She wants the sex, but not the intimacy that is so often demanded along with it.  She hasn’t time for or inclination to an in-depth relationship, and even if she did she wouldn’t choose a rich playboy who won’t be there for ever, alpha bad-boy or not.  If it comes to it, she’d rather have no-one than make that sort of a mistake.  It’s not as if she isn’t used to having no-one, and if her dreams are better, hotter, now, based on the big, muscular reality currently deeply asleep in her bed, well, sweet dreams are made of this, and who is she to disagree?  She’ll have her dreams, long after the man himself is gone. 

She circles round her own uncertainty, never getting close to the heart of her indecision.  Unconsciously, unknowingly, she’s building up the walls that allow her to hide herself away, keep her heart and soul undamaged, and preserve the life she’s constructed: where the only thing she needs or wants to care about is standing for the dead.  She’s quite deliberately ignoring the flashes that she’s had of the man behind the mask, the glimpses of someone real.  She’s seen the uncertainty she causes him, her ability to hurt him, but she won’t accept it; she’s heard the words and the undertones that should tell her, if she only listened, that he’s already one step beyond a brief affair.  She can’t afford to believe in any of it.  Fairytales are for small children: cops deal only with hard reality.  Hard reality forced her to become a cop.

Deep inside, trapped within her ever-thickening walls, a small smidgeon of self-awareness tries to tell her that actually she’s scared.  Scared to face the truth that her life is a lonely road rapidly reaching the buffers of burnout.  Scared to face up to the fact that she’s turning her back on her friend and her father and her colleagues and any possibility of something new in favour of dealing with the dead.  Scared to know that she deals almost exclusively, now, with the dead because they demand nothing from her that she isn’t willing and able to give: they demand everything from her and so there’s nothing left to give anyone else.  No need to take a chance, no need to risk yourself, no possibility of getting hurt.  People who care, get hurt.  She doesn’t listen to that voice.  She never does, and every time she doesn’t listen it slips a little further away, its cry a little weaker.

She curls into the couch, puts out the light, closes her eyes, reluctant to think any further.  Shortly she slips back into sleep, free now to move restlessly in her sleep as she always does.

* * *

 

Castle hadn’t fallen asleep, still thinking matters over some time after Beckett seemed to be wholly dead to the world, still, perforce, cuddled into him.  He hadn’t had any intention of letting go of her, and therefore hadn’t, nor of leaving so quickly.  He’ll need to go eventually, but he intends to leave a note when he does, explaining the need for him to be home at breakfast.  He doesn’t let his daughter down.  But for now, he’s quite content to drift into sleep, clutching _his_ Beckett, satisfied that he’s given her plenty of reasons to want him to stay, shown her that he’s the drug she needs.

He wakes suddenly, chilled and shaky, more of the half-remembered nightmares lurking in the shadows.  It had been the big man again, menacing; aggressively jabbing at an unseen woman – how could he be sure that in his dream it was a woman, if they were unseen?  But he’s certain it was – laying down the law: the dingy reality that governs the theatre: do as I say or be fired.  Whether it’s legal, decent, honest or moral – or absolutely none of the above.  ( _It didn’t happen, Ricky.  It was just a bad dream.  Don’t cry, kiddo. It’s okay._ )

He reaches for Beckett, who’s unaccountably escaped his grasp, looking for her warm reality to chase away the nightmare, and is shocked out the last shreds of sleep when he can’t find her there.  Peering at his watch shows it’s four a.m., and the bed around him empty, no light, no sound in the apartment.  She can’t have gone, surely?  Not even Beckett would go to work at four a.m.  A maggot of unease wriggles through his mind.  She wouldn’t just have got up and left him behind to go to work, would she?  If a body had dropped, she’d have woken him.  Surely she would?  He gets up, slips into his boxers and shirt – Beckett’s apartment is not terribly warm – and quietly exits the room to search for Beckett and then bring her back to where he wants her. 

It only takes him one comprehensive sweep through her living room to find her, despite the gloom, curled into a corner of her couch and fast asleep; smudged eyes and looking very much younger without the focused glare that he’s used to seeing when she’s awake.  He watches for a while, enjoying the view, studying her restless, unceasing movement.  She couldn’t be described as peaceful, awake or asleep, though she’s just as taciturn in sleep as by day.

Still, he’s unimpressed that she’s out here, to say the least.  Why’s she sleeping on her own couch, instead of curled into him like she had been, like she should be?  Well, he can fix that.  He gathers her up, not without a little effort: despite his strength and her slimness she’s tall, and she carries a reasonable amount of muscle herself; and carries her back through to the bedroom.  She starts to rouse, settles back and curls an arm around his neck to snuggle in, never fully wakes.  Castle lays her gently down, drops his shirt and slides back into bed, spooned against her and arm over her midriff.  He’s left her robe on, he realises, but he doesn’t want to wake her and he’s pretty sure that undressing her will, not least because he’s a little mad that she was gone when he woke (he knows this is entirely unreasonable but he doesn’t care because she is _his_ now – surely after three times she must be? - and running away is simply not in the game plan) and he might just decide to show her all the good reasons she should have stayed.

He’ll ask her about it, later, and if he doesn’t like her reasons… he can convince her otherwise.  Try to convince her.  He sets his watch to wake him at a time conducive to reaching his loft early enough to shower and then have breakfast with Alexis, and then slips back into slumber, Beckett safely in his arms.  He doesn’t dream again, once she’s there.

It turns out that Beckett’s own alarm is set to a time that Castle would rather not see from this end of the day, though it’s only a few moments before his would have chimed.  It also appears that his continued presence was not expected.  It’s not entirely clear that it’s welcomed, either, though he has a strong suspicion that nothing other than a hot shower and strong coffee is welcomed by Beckett in the morning.  He suddenly realises that she puts in the hours at both beginning and end of the day, burning both ends of the candle for the corpses.  He wonders how long she can keep doing that, and remembers Esposito’s words.  _We all know she’s heading for burnout_.  At rifle-shot speed, he thinks.  He smiles sleepily.  He’ll stop that dash to burnout.  She’ll have something else to focus on.  Him.  Three times is the charm, and they’ve been together three separate times.  She’s addicted, even if she doesn’t know it.

“You’re still here.”  Beckett’s clear tones cut right through his becoming-predatory musings.  “Shouldn’t you have gone home?”  Castle smirks with his best celebrity everyone-loves-me expression, and watches Beckett’s pre-caffeine irritation rise as she slides out of bed, still enveloped in the robe.

“You didn’t seem to want to let go of me.”  He sits up and swings his legs over the edge of the bed.  Light the fuse…

“I didn’t want to let go of _you_?  Wasn’t me imitating a boa constrictor.”  Something evidently occurs to her.  “And how come I was in bed anyway?  I got up.  I was” – she stops.  Castle stands up, and stretches.  Beckett regards his flexing muscles with disfavour, instead of being distracted.

“You were asleep on the couch.  You’d have woken with a crick in your neck.”  He grins smugly, and takes an unobtrusive step in Beckett’s direction.  “So I took you back to bed.”  Pause.  “Where you should have been.” And… stand well back, in case of fireworks.  Metaphorically.

“Where I should have been?”  If she’s furious, she’s not showing one iota of it.  Her voice is very cool.  All her barriers are in place.  “And where might that be?”

“In bed with me, of course.”  He prowls a little closer.  “If you’re not going to stay put, I’ll need to work out a way of keeping you put.”  And another step towards her, not just physically.  “Your handcuffs should do it.”

The sharp intake of breath and the green flare in her eyes tells him far more than he thinks she would like him to know.  Dark desire rises up in him instantly: the thought of Beckett handcuffed and stretched out and open to him: giving him complete control.  So he kisses her, because there’s not enough time to explore where that admission could take them now, and there’s barely time to explore her mouth.  When he’s sure he’s left her stupefied and taken her far-too-sharp mind off what she might just have revealed, he pulls back.  He tries not to show Beckett how much effort it takes to do that rather than push the robe off her shoulders and carry on down, but judging from the dazed, cat-and-cream expression on her face she’s guessed it anyway.  He steps back before his last small vestige of control snaps.

“I need to get home.  Just think about what I said, Detective, about staying where I put you.”  She’s staring at him like he’s her first cup of coffee of the day and biting her lip.  He’s sure she doesn’t know she’s doing it.  _Got you, Beckett.  I see you_.  He hurriedly dresses.  Any more of this discussion and he won’t be going anywhere for a while.  “See you later.”

It’s not until he’s halfway home in the cab, with a sulky dawn rising over Manhattan, that he realises he’d stayed the night.  He’s never stayed the night. 

* * *

 

Beckett’s still staring at the shut door for rather too long a while after she’s heard the elevator bell that means that Castle is safely gone.  Eventually she manages to shake herself out of the state she’s in and forces herself into the hottest shower she can stand.  It doesn’t help anything, but she hates cold showers.  Every slide of her body wash reminds her of just how Castle’s hands and mouth had made her feel.  Each time, she thinks about how good it would be if she took the next step into the water.    Each time, his words echo through her head, and slither down her nerves, and trigger all the dreams she’s had.  She’s still trying to squash down the memory when she hits her desk. 

But focus on the cases easily removes any other considerations once she’s alone, even if it’s only paperwork. When Ryan and Esposito arrive, an hour later, for the start of shift, she’s already deeply engrossed.  She’s so lost in thought she doesn’t see or hear them.  It’s probably the only reason she doesn’t kill them for sniggering when they see the mug full of coffee – not the previous paper cup of caffeinated machine sludge – on her desk. Sadly, she can’t block them out for ever.

“Yo, Beckett.  What’s that on your desk?”

“Paperwork,” she says blandly.  She knows what they mean, but she’s not that easy.

“In the mug, Beckett.”

“Coffee.”

“Thought you’d sworn never to touch that – what d’ya call it? – oh yeah – ridiculously inappropriate distraction?”  Esposito’s smirk is so wide she could tie it in a bow.

Ryan chips in his two-cents worth.  “Along with making a few comments about the man who got it here – spoilt smug arrogant playboy throwing his money around, yeah?”

Back to Esposito, perfect hand-off to the other half of the tag-team.  “So if you’re drinking his coffee, Beckett, does that mean you’re getting’ closer to the man?”  He starts to laugh.  Ryan’s already snickering.  Beckett, however, doesn’t blink.  Standard bullpen banter doesn’t faze her in the slightest.

“You have gotta be kidding, Espo.  I’d rather enter you and Ryan in the next Manhattan’s Best-Dressed Cop competition.”  Fortunately, neither Ryan nor Espo notice that she’s actually not answered him.  She hasn’t even lied.  The amusement value from entering Ryan and Espo into a Best-Dressed anything competition would be more or less endless.  Both men splutter.  Unfortunately, they don’t leave off.

“So why’ve you abandoned your principles, Beckett?  I mean, drinking the coffee, it’s one step down the primrose path.”  She looks at Ryan quizzically.

“What?  I went to Catholic school.  You don’t forget some things.”  She glares.  It has no effect at all.  “It’s the first step, Beckett.  Can’t pretend you hate his guts if you’re swigging his coffee.”  Esposito nods vigorously.

“Yeah, Beckett.  You’ll need to be nicer to him.  It’s just rude to drink his coffee and still mess with him like you do.”  The glare increases in intensity.  “Just sayin’.”

“Are you boys intending to do any work today or are you just here for a chat?”  The change in tone tells them that they’ve gone far enough.  They retreat to their own desks, alert for any further opportunities to amuse themselves and wind up Beckett.

It’s lucky they don’t know it’s the second mugful.  She’d never live that down.  She’ll be lucky if they stop with the ragging about this by a week next Wednesday.  And seeing as they’re all best buddies with Castle, she’ll have to listen to him crowing about it too.  Probably for much, much longer.  And that thought takes her right back to what Castle had said just before he left and suddenly there’s a flare of heat some way south of her waist and she really cannot afford to be distracted like this.  But the sharp talons of her own desires are extended now, and no matter how much she concentrates on the never-ending paperwork they never quite retract fully.  She keeps a fraction of her attention on the bullpen around her, expecting Castle, and at the end of the day she’s quite unreasonably annoyed that he didn’t show up.  Not that she lets herself know it.  She attributes her irritation to the paperwork and the inability to make any progress with any of the old, cold cases it represents, and goes home, long after shift ended, thoroughly frustrated with the day.

* * *

 

Castle spent the second half of the cab ride; his hasty, cool, shower; and not a little part of breakfast with Alexis trying frantically to work out what happened last night to make him stay over.  He never stays over.  He has a strict policy of never staying over.  That way he never gets trapped into anything: no-one can ever be misled into thinking it’s more than a one-night stand, or at best a brief affair.  He gets what he wants, whoever it was gets what she wants, and he walks away, no harm, no foul.  He sees Alexis off, clears up breakfast, and retreats to his study.  He needs to think.  He should have thought a week ago, and he didn’t, couldn’t, too appalled at what he nearly did to think _why_ he nearly did it. 

 _Okay, stop and think, Rick.  What the hell is going on here?_   He stayed over.  He never, ever does that.  He almost, almost tried to force kisses on her, when she didn’t want them.  He never, ever, does that, either.  He’s been chasing her for seven weeks, since the first moment he saw her; following her around for six; he’s been with her three times and he’s still not sure that she’s actually likes him at all.  Most of the time she’s behaved as if she hates him: it’s only recently that her attitude has softened merely to irritation.  And yet when she’s _with_ him it’s a firestorm: neither of them have any control at all: it’s hot and hard and desperate and it’s only when the first round’s over that there’s any chance at all of slowing it down, dialling back, regulating their actions so that he can find out what really turns her on. (He does.  He turns her on.)

That is not helping.  He wrenches his mind away from the vision of Beckett naked and in bed.  He has to get on top ( _bad word choice, Rick. Very bad._ ) of this before it mutates into something that he doesn’t need and doesn’t want.  Okay.  So what does he want?  He wants to finish the story.  He wants Beckett in his bed right here – his bed?  What?  He doesn’t want anyone in his bed in the loft but him.  But she’d fit, very nicely, and he might not have quite so many bruises because there’d be more space for her to move without knocking into him, and he’d still know that she was there.  _Stop this, Rick. Stop right now.  Focus_.  He wants Beckett.  Why?  Well.  Why indeed?  Because she’s not boring.  Because she’s unbelievably hot.  Because she pretends she doesn’t need him.  (That’ll change, though.  He’ll make her admit she needs him; that she cares.)  Because he wants her, and he always gets what he wants, for as long as he wants it, and she’s not playing his game.  Which is all very circular and doesn’t help at all.  Besides which, it’s all pointless.  He wants her, and wants her story, and needs to write his story, and that is it.  He tells himself that there’s nothing more to it, and doesn’t think at all about why he wants her to care.  Solving her story will ensure that she comes to him and there’ll be no more of this uncertainty.  That’s why he’s behaving like this.  He’s been uncertain.  Well, he doesn’t have to be now.  Three times is the charm, and now she’ll come to him, whenever he – and she - wants.  She will.

And just to prove that this is simply another affair, and he doesn’t need to be uncertain, he won’t go to the precinct or see Beckett until another body drops.  She’ll be eager to see him, then; she’ll have missed him.  He doesn’t need to hang round her neck.  He doesn’t need to think about her, either.  He’s Rick Castle, and he’s never uncertain about women at all.

His resolve lasts all the way till dinner.


	22. Don't stand so close to me

Castle has written almost all day, turning out chapter after chapter of well-polished phrases and exciting action.  He doesn’t need Gina, or Paula with her PR stunts, or sales figures to tell him that this will be a success.  The words simply leap out of his mind and on to the page without let or hindrance.  He’s so far ahead of schedule he can barely believe it: for once there’s no need for anyone to chase him for unmet deadlines or unwritten sections.  At this rate he’ll be ready for publication in September, which for him will be something of a record.  Nikki Heat is going to be far bigger than Storm; he can feel that.  But eventually he draws to a stop, done with publishable Nikki for the day, and wanting to let the next episodes ferment in the back of his head for a little while, till they settle into shape.

He’s rather pleased with himself, and not a little smug.  He hasn’t missed being at the precinct at all.  No.  Okay, so Beckett popped into his head every time he described Nikki, every time he wrote a line of her dialogue, but he didn’t need to be following her round to write.  She’s perfectly imprinted on his brain, just where he needs her to be….

What the _fuck_?

He can’t have Beckett imprinted on his brain.  That’s not the plan.  That can’t happen.  It’s just because of the character, just because she’s his current inspiration.  (He doesn’t remember that this never happened with Clara Strike)  It’ll cool off.  Just because he wants to keep her for now, doesn’t mean it won’t fade.  But before it does, they’ll have a very, very good time.

Which brings him right back to the fervid imaginings of very first thing this morning, before he’d come home.  He’d left before she’d got dressed, so he doesn’t know what she’s wearing today.  Underneath, that is.  He would bet on another highly professional and completely unrevealing button down with dress pants, on the outside.  It rapidly occurs to him that he could simply call her, ask her over, and find out.  Leaving her alone until a new body drops is forgotten, lost in the fire of his lustful thoughts, as if it had never been.

Another thought arrives in his brain before he manages to locate his phone.  He hasn’t called Dr Murray yet.  He’ll just do that first.  Might as well get that moving.  Clark Murray can be very busy.  He finally finds his phone.

“Clark?  Hey.  It’s Rick.  I’ve got a little problem I think you can help me with.  A puzzle.  Wanna play?”

“Sure, Rick.  What is it this time?  Decomposition rates?  Blowfly breeding?  Weird and wonderful poisons?  Please, Rick, no more heads in microwaves, though.  That was messy.”

“No, not this time.  But it was really cool, wasn’t it?  Didn’t you like it?  Especially when I” –

“No.  Not at all.”

“Clark,”  Castle’s voice turns serious.  “I got a cold case for you.  I need you to look at some photos, see what you think.”

“Rick, what are you messing with this time?  Cold case?  Photos?  This isn’t your usual style.  What’s going on?”  Castle scrambles for an acceptable lie, and decides to mix it with enough truth to make it palatable and believable.

“You know I’m shadowing a detective at the Twelfth Precinct, for research?”

“Yes?”

“Yeah.  Like when I wrote Clara Strike.”

“Ah.  And what does that mean?”

“It means I found a new inspiration, Clark.  It’s gonna be huge.  Even bigger than Storm.”  Castle enthuses for another few minutes.

“Fascinating as your loquacity is, Rick, I have appointments.  Why are you looking at a cold case, and why do you need me to look at it?  And most importantly, what on earth is its relevance to this ‘Nikki Heat’ character?”  Dr Murray clearly has an irrelevant thought.  “What sort of a name is ‘Nikki Heat’, anyway?”

“One that will sell books.  C’mon, Clark.  D’you wanna play or not?”  Dr Murray shakes his head, unseen.  Rick Castle full of enthusiasm is almost unstoppable, and generally irresistible.  And whatever this new bee in his bonnet might be, it sounds fairly interesting.  Rick’s enthusiasms are rarely boring.  Short-lived, and frequently messy, but not boring.

“Okay, I’m in.   But I’m a bit busy right now.  You in a hurry for answers?”

Castle thinks.  He is.  He wants the answers yesterday, or a week ago.  But he also likes Clark Murray, and doesn’t want to rush him and maybe not get the right answers.  “I’d rather you took your time, gave me the best answer you can.”

“Rick, are you going to tell me what this is about?”

“Yeah, I’ll let you know when I bring you over the file.  Thanks.  Bye.” 

Right.  That’s got that moving.  He knew Clark would come through.  He can’t resist a professional challenge.  If there are answers to find, Clark will find them.  And if there’s nothing to find, he’ll find that too.  Step one to keeping Beckett, complete.  He smiles slowly, and considers how she might show her appreciation.

His contemplations are rudely interrupted by inquiries about dinner, and he realises that he’d better do something about that, before his family swarms around him, ravenous.  He finds plenty of ingredients in the fridge for stir fry and concentrates hard enough not to include a couple of fingers in the julienned vegetables.  Stir fry has, he notes, the considerable advantage of taking almost no time to cook, and not much longer to eat.  After dinner he’ll call Beckett, ask her over.  If he _asks_ , he’s sure she’ll come.  Dinner largely passes him by, lost in his reveries.

He hasn’t just forgotten that he wasn’t going to contact her till she did him, he’s forgotten that he doesn’t bring his affairs home.

* * *

 

Beckett’s just got home, and is rather disconsolately looking at her empty fridge and trying to find her pile of takeout menus, when her phone chimes.  Looking at the screen, and caller ID, it’s Castle.  What’s he want at this time?  She wants peace and quiet and solitude.  She swipes on her phone, already irritated before she speaks.

“What?” she snaps.

“That’s not friendly, Beckett,” Castle’s far-too-sexy voice oozes over her and pools right where she doesn’t want it.  She briefly considers the childish response of _Don’t care_ , but thinks better of it.

“What do you want, Castle?  I’m not in the mood for your persiflage.”

She might as well have been performing a striptease in front of him.  Her use of language goes straight to his groin.  _So clever_.  He lo – _admires_ her vocabulary.  He wants her, right now.

“Would you like to come over?” 

“No,” she replies automatically and still snappishly.  She’s tired, irritable and hungry, and mild headache is settling around her temples.  Sexy voices pooling south of her navel are not sufficient to overcome any of that.  She doesn’t want to go anywhere further than the door, when she’s decided on and ordered takeout and it arrives.  Eating might help.  There’s a short pause.

“Have you just got home?”  When she doesn’t bother answering, there’s a new question.  “Have you even eaten?”

“I’m just getting something.”  Hold on.  She doesn’t answer to Writer-Boy. She doesn’t answer to anyone, outside work.  Another good reason not to get into a relationship.  People think they can make demands of her, try to manage the way she runs her life.  She’s had enough of that.  “What business is it of yours anyway?”  She doesn’t even try to make that polite.

“If you haven’t eaten, there’s food here.  If you came over.”  Tempting.  But not that tempting. Takeout, Tylenol and sleep are a lot more tempting.

“No.  I’m tired.”

“Maybe if you hadn’t spent twelve hours in the precinct you wouldn’t be so tired.”  Oh shit, that was a mistake.  He’s smooth, suave and sophisticated, always in control of affairs.  How does he so consistently manage to say the wrong thing at the wrong time to Beckett?  Sounding like he’s criticising her work ethic is hardly likely to go well.  “Was there a new case, and you didn’t tell me?”  He’s desperately trying to cover up the first sentence.  It doesn’t work.  He can hear Beckett’s frazzled temper snap without even needing the phone connection.

“I have a job.  Just because you’re rich enough to sit around doing nothing all day doesn’t mean the rest of the world can.”

Castle is rapidly losing his own temper thanks to that nasty comment.  If he were less mad, he might wonder how it is that Beckett can so readily – without even trying – catch him on the raw.  She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.  He hadn’t always been rich, or anything like it, and he works his ass off to write good books.  He tries very hard, most of the time, not to remember how it had been when he was a child.  (It’s why he gives his mother everything she wants to buy, and only ever teases her very gently about it.  There were a lot of times that she couldn’t buy anything at all, except what was absolutely necessary for her child.)  But he’s not going to say that.  He’s not going to show her his history.  It’s not relevant to who he is now.  The sheer hypocrisy of wanting to know all of her story without revealing any of his doesn’t even start to enter his thoughts.

“So you tell me why your job means you spend twice as long in the precinct as your shift?  You’re in before the boys and you never go home.  You haven’t even eaten.  You don’t have to do that, but you do.  Wanna tell me why?”  He’s only just not shouting.  She won’t take care of herself.  ( _It’s okay, kiddo.  I’m not hungry.  You eat up now._ )  She has to take better care of herself.

“That’s my decision, not yours.  Butt out, Writer-Boy.  I don’t need you pretending you want to take care of me.”  Buzz.  She’s put the phone down on him.  _She’s put the fucking phone down on him._   Nobody puts the phone down on him.  Castle’s normally unruffled temper finally gives out. 

“Mother?  Mother!”

“Yes, darling?”

“I have to go out.  Will you stay with Alexis?”

“Of course, kiddo.”  She looks carefully at her son.  “Is something wrong?”

“No, just some business I need to take care of.”  He manufactures a grin, though there are too many teeth in it for good humour. “Try not to drink all my best wine.”  And he’s gone.  Martha looks at the door swinging shut behind him and wonders what on earth has bitten his butt.  Ever since he started on this new book he’s been acting strangely.  Oh well.  Motherly instincts will let her work it out, in due time.

When someone knocks on the door Beckett assumes it’s her pizza, though normally they’re not quite so peremptory.  However, when she checks through the peephole it’s Castle, looking very angry.  He can just stay outside, then.  She doesn’t want a fight, she wants her pizza, a soda and her bed.  She’d rather have wine but wine and Tylenol don’t mix.  She goes back to her couch and the no-brain-required movie, comfortably changed into in a sloppy T-shirt and sleep shorts, that she’s desultorily watching because she doesn’t want to read till after the Tylenol kicks in.  Her phone cheeps.  It’s Castle.  She declines the call.  It cheeps again.  It’s Castle, again.  She declines the call, again.  This continues for three rounds, when she switches it off.  There’s blessed silence.  With luck, he’s gone home.  With even more luck, he won’t show up at the precinct unless and until she has to call him with the next case.  (She wouldn’t even do that right now, except it’s orders.)  She takes a few deep, soothing breaths and tries to relax, cast off the irritation. 

A little while later, a discreet tap on her door turns out, when Beckett glares suspiciously through the peephole, to be her takeout pizza.  Unfortunately, when she opens the door, it also turns out to be (definitely _not_ her) takeout arrogant Writer-Boy, who pushes in without so much as an excuse-me while she’s getting her purse to pay the delivery boy.  Dirty rotten scoundrel must have hung around quietly until opportunity presented itself.  More manipulation to make events fall out his way.  So she won’t rise to his bait.  She’ll just ignore him.  He won’t leave if she simply says so, and she’s too tired to physically push him out the door, but he won’t do anything more than try to talk even if he stands there all night.  She can be perfectly sure of that.

Beckett pays the delivery boy, who’s looking very much as if he’d rather be anywhere but here, preferably ten minutes ago, closes the door, ignores Castle completely and returns to her couch and her soda with the pizza.  The Tylenol is not having much effect any more.  She keeps all her attention strictly on the movie and the pizza. 

It takes approximately half the pizza, which Beckett appears to be inhaling, before Castle has his annoyance under enough control to speak.

“I’m still here.”  Silence.  “Beckett, you know I’m here.  I’m not going any place till you talk to me.”  Beckett carries on inhaling pizza and soda and doesn’t so much as turn her head.  It’s not even that good a movie.  (He’s seen it.  It has no redeeming features at all.  Especially since Beckett’s fully focused on Colin Firth in a wet shirt.)  Okay, so she’s able to block out anything she doesn’t want to think about.  He knows that.  What’s he doing here anyway?  So she didn’t want to come over, so what?  And then she hadn’t left the precinct until she was exhausted and she hadn’t eaten and why the hell does he care about that anyway?  What’s her inability to take care of herself got to do with addicting her to him and keeping her with him?  He doesn’t know the answer to that, so he ignores it, rationalising it by thinking that if she’s tired and hungry she won’t be up for any of the more enjoyable ways he could relax her, and tells himself that that’s the only reason that he cares. ( _You eat up now._ )

He lasts only until Beckett’s swallowed the last slice of pizza and stands up to clear the mess away.  She still hasn’t bothered to acknowledge his existence in any way at all.  It’s just like the first time he screwed up around her.  Then she was angry.  Now she’s just indifferent.  Well, he definitely is not indifferent.  He’s made her beg and writhe and scream and she is _not_ going to pretend she’s indifferent and not even talk to him. 

When Beckett’s finished tidying up Castle has parked his oversized self on her couch.  Fine.  She was going to bed anyway.  She makes for her bedroom, still ignoring him.

“If you go to bed I’ll just follow you till you talk to me.”

“I didn’t invite you over, so I don’t have to talk to you.” 

She’s quite astoundingly tense at the idea of talking to him, he notices.  In fact, she hasn’t consciously said a single personal thing inside the precinct or out since she’d told him about her mother, except at dinner to say where she’d been at college, he realises with a jolt.  That had only been because he’d asked a direct question. And… she hadn’t intended to show up to dinner, and if it hadn’t been for Lanie she wouldn’t have done.  It dawns on him that she doesn’t want to have told him anything: that she’d erase it from his memory if she could;  that in fact she would probably erase herself from his existence if she could; that he hadn’t been mistaken when he’d thought that she’d put up a barrier.  She certainly has.  Started putting it up the moment she’d left after mentioning her mother and has, he is almost certain, only been reinforcing it every instant since.  He doesn’t say anything, waiting her out.

“You can leave now.”  More indifference.  Castle’s getting bored of that game very quickly.  He’s really not good at patience.  He needs to break this shell, if he’s ever going to get what he wants.

“Shan’t.  Why wouldn’t you come over?”

“Didn’t want to.  Why don’t you just listen to what I say?  I’m tired.  Go away and let me go to bed.”

“Not till I’ve tucked you in,” he grins.  “Someone ought to.”  Yet again, it’s the wrong thing to say.  Beckett’s face twists bitterly, not seeing any humour in his speech at all.  She’s spitting words at him.

“I don’t want someone pretending to take care of me and suffocating me.  I don’t want a relationship.”  The venom in that last word would have done credit to a king cobra.  Castle rapidly recasts his next sentence to achieve what he wants, ignoring for the moment just how much those two sentences bite.  He’ll think about her little admission some other time.

“Well, that’s just fine, because I don’t want to take care of you.”  And quite, quite astonishingly that statement seems to have worked.  It must be the very first time in his whole adult life that a woman’s told him she doesn’t want a relationship (especially with him) and actually, genuinely meant it.  It’s certainly the first time he’s felt it necessary to tell a woman he _doesn’t_ want to take care of her in order to keep her.  Usually it’s exactly the reverse.  At least it would be, if he ever had to try at all.  The tension’s flowed out of Beckett’s shoulders and she’s paused in her bedroom doorway.  The only teeny, tiny problem, which he’ll fix sometime later, is that he’s lying by omission _and_ commission through his perfect, perfectly gritted, teeth.  He doesn’t care that he’s lying.  Ethics are not relevant when it comes to keeping Beckett.  There’s another pregnant pause.

“And now we got that settled, come here.”  It’s not a request.  Beckett looks at him, quirking an eyebrow, which mutates, as she looks at his hungry smile, into a slow, sleepy, yawn-split smile of her own.

“Still tired, Castle.  Only one direction I’m going.”  She gets two paces inside her bedroom door before he’s caught her.  She pushes ineffectually at him, too tired to be able to make her point with force.  Of course, if she weren’t so tired she wouldn’t need to make this point, she’d be playing a very much more enjoyable game.  Especially as he doesn't want to have a relationship, or take care of her.  Perfect.  They’ll solve the cases and find justice for the dead, faster, better.  If they enjoy themselves along the way, no harm, no foul.  And then it’ll be done.  She pushes ineffectually again, yawning.  Castle’s reaction is to swing her up into his arms, take a couple of long strides, and drop her on the bed.

“You are tired.”  Beckett glares, the glare not noticeably diluted by her exhaustion.

“Told you so.”  She wriggles under her covers.  “Night.”  She’s not entirely surprised when Castle sits down on the edge of the bed, puts both hands round her face, leans down and kisses her firmly, leisurely possessiveness fully on display.

“That’s how you say goodnight, Beckett.”  She supposes that that’s rather more sociable than the mere words.  “Till tomorrow.”  And then he’s gone, which proves, she thinks, that she’s got what she wants.  Someone who isn’t going to try to get involved, or fuss over her, or stifle her.

Someone, in fact, who won’t force her to face up to the truth about her life.


	23. Been a juju boy

Castle whistles down a cab outside Beckett’s building and spends the entire ride home plotting, gets back to his own loft and goes to his study to plot some more.  He can’t decide whether he’s angry, intrigued, or appalled by Beckett’s current attitude. (Obsessed goes without saying.  As does aroused.)  A considerable piece of focused thinking is quite clearly required, if he wants this to be a comfortably conducted affair, now that he’s returned to his normal unruffled calm.  So.  Where has he got to?  She doesn’t like being told what to do. (except, perhaps, he thinks, in some very defined, private, circumstances which he intends to explore in some detail in the very near future)    She never gives up control. (except, again, in private circumstances)  She doesn’t like being, or want to be, taken care of.  She doesn’t want a relationship, and has said so in the bluntest possible terms.  She doesn’t, in fact, want anything from anyone, whether she might need it or not.  She’s white-hot under his body, but she can take or leave him all the rest of the time.  She hates talking in general, and hates more revealing anything at all about herself.  She’s converted all her feelings about her mother’s death into a hard-edged focus on solving murders for other people.  And the sum total of all of that is that she has no life at all outside the job, and she doesn’t even care.

Which is what he wants, isn’t it?  He doesn’t want a romance, he wants an affair: no strings, no permanence, no entanglements.  Doesn’t he?  That’s why he’s solving her case for her, so that there’s nothing that can interfere, no pain that might play on his heartstrings.  He just wants an affair.

Doesn’t he?

There’s a poisonous little voice in his head that keeps telling him that actually he doesn’t know what he wants.  Because she’s hurt him, again, without even noticing.  She doesn’t want him – what were her exact words? – _pretending to take care of her._   And he knows that he was lying when he said he didn’t want to take care of her.  He knows he’s solving her case not just to prove how clever, how valuable, he is; how much he’s worth to her, but because he saw her pain, and he wants to fix it.  Fixing it will bring her to him, and keep her there, and make her happy.  ( _I can make it better.  I can_ )

She doesn’t want a relationship.  That same nasty little voice is telling him that he doesn’t know what he wants there either.  He’s not into relationships.  But she’s only got more fascinating with time: her job, her mind, her body, her story, everything.  He wants all of her, not just her bed or his.  But she doesn’t want to give it, and even though he wants all of her he isn’t at all sure that he wants to break the habit of some considerable time and have a longish affair, let alone a relationship.  Though he definitely wants far more than the current succession of one-night stands.  She’s his now.  Even if she doesn’t want to admit it.

Yet.  She doesn’t want to admit it,  _yet_ .

Well.  Seems like he hasn’t a clue about anything, which is not a problem from which he normally suffers when it comes to women.  But… he suddenly smiles, perfectly happily.  It’s not actually a problem at all.  He doesn’t need to have a clue.  He just needs to play along.  If she doesn’t want to be taken care of, if she doesn’t want a relationship, then he simply won’t push it, unless and until he decides he needs to do so.  She’ll get used to him being around, and gradually she’ll let him in.  Even if she doesn’t, when he’s solved her case she’ll come to him, because he’ll have made it better, and then she’ll share.  He doesn’t need to do anything just now, just enjoy what  _is_ on offer and slowly boil his frog.  He’ll still get what he wants, in the end.  And along the way, he won’t need to worry about repressing any impulses to take care of her or have a relationship with her or that he’ll get overly involved, because that’ll all come naturally to a fully fruited relationship as she sees more of him. 

He’s perfectly satisfied with the conclusions of his thinking as he makes a coffee and retires back to his study, pausing just before he opens his laptop, publishable Nikki and Rook nicely fermented and ready to pour out as he’d hoped when he put them away before dinner.  But first, he simply wants to run over the interesting, comfortable sensation of Beckett in his arms all night (well, nearly all night) and the interesting, but ultimately very uncomfortable, sensation of kissing her without being able to fall into bed with her. 

And, he realises sharply, by not doing so, not pushing for more, he didn’t behave like those other men, who would never have accepted silence, or tiredness, or any excuse, or any good reason, not to push and force and take what they wanted.  He isn’t that man.  He really isn’t, and the sudden reassurance of that knowledge gives him confidence.  Maybe with Beckett, he can be who he is, explore the darker waters that she’s intimated she likes, that he knows he likes, without any risk that he’ll overstep and become that man.  _Because_ she doesn’t need him, any way around.  She’ll never agree to anything she doesn’t want, because she doesn’t need him for her career or her PR or her status or his money or the sheer kudos of being seen with him.  In a strange way, that gives him – them – complete freedom: because they’re on an equal footing.  He’s nearly lightheaded with the realisation.  He doesn’t need to worry about her saying yes if actually she doesn’t want to but thinks she needs to or has to or ought to.  She simply – won’t.  And if he tried to insist – not that he ever would, because he _is not_ that man – she’d shoot him, and with Espo, Ryan and Lanie dispose of the body where it would never be found.

Maybe, Castle thinks, maybe he can be who he is in the precinct, and be who he is with Beckett.  Maybe he can be real, not the PR construct that he’s made his own every time he leaves his own front door.  Maybe there’s more to him than that bored, spoilt, arrogant celebrity.  That persona’s useless in the face of death.  In the precinct, he can use his mind – he’s a long way from stupid, but focused intelligence isn’t what the fans are looking for – and his abilities, without it damaging his PR image.  Which he does need to keep, at least partly, to sell books.  With Beckett – well.  Let’s not think about that, at least if he wants to achieve any publishable writing tonight.

He turns to his laptop and begins, words flooding out of his fingers on to the page.  All the time, unnoticed in the back of his brain, the image of Beckett snuggled against him settles in and comforts him.

* * *

 

He’s woken by his phone.  As he shakes sleep from his head, he realises that it’s not the ringtone he’s carefully programmed in for Beckett. (Ride of the Valkyries. Desperately clichéd, but still appropriate until he can find a song that includes murder in the title.  Though Murder on the Dancefloor just didn’t cut it.)  Ugh.  It’s too early, whatever time it is.  He’d written too late, too much, and in the too-bright light of another Manhattan morning he’s petulantly sure that it’ll need more editing than he’s really up for.  It’s too early, and who the hell is calling at – oh.  It’s nearly ten.  He vaguely remembers getting up to have breakfast with Alexis, seeing her off to school, and then thinking that he’d just have a little more sleep before going to the precinct to see what’s going on and finding some more inspiration.

“Rick Castle,” he says, in smooth tones, because it’s sure to be someone in front of whom he needs to keep up the persona.

“Ricky.”  Oh God.  He knows that voice.  “Kitten, I’m in New York.  Isn’t that wonderful?  I’m coming right over to see you.  Have you missed me?”  He knows that tone, too.  And any time previously, he’d have been perfectly happy with that.  Meredith knows what he likes, and is prepared to play along.  Now, however, he simply isn’t interested.  He has absolutely no desire to play with Meredith at all any more. 

“Meredith…” he says faintly.  She just rolls right over him.  She never has listened to him.

“I’ll be with you in a few minutes, Ricky.  I’m already in the cab.  Get ready, kitten.”  She cuts the call.  He mentally prepares himself for what is sure to be an unpleasant scene, and wonders whether he should find a cup for protection of his assets.

He’s not wrong.  He’s barely opened the door to Meredith when she launches herself at him.  She’s instantly unhappy when he holds her at a distance, changing to spoilt-child impending-tantrum when he starts to explain.

“Meredith, I’m not going to bed with you.”  She pouts, beautifully.  She’s always beautiful, in that slightly petulant, celebutante, wannabe actress manner.  But now he wants something entirely different: spark and fire and professional woman who’s not artificial in any way at all.

“Kitten, don’t play hard to get.  I don’t wanna waste any time.”  He hates her calling him kitten. 

“I’m not.  I am not sleeping with you.”  She looks astonished.  (her last Botox must be wearing off, he thinks unkindly.  She’s actually got an expression.)

“But Ricky, it’s not as if you’ve got someone else.  What’s the problem?”  She looks as if she’s about to suggest the only sort of problems she can imagine would stop him.  “Can’t you get it” –

“No problem.”  He’s not about to tell Meredith, who is wholly incapable of discretion, that there is someone else.  Especially not a someone who barely thinks she’s with him.  He is perfectly sure that any hint of Beckett on page six and she’d try to kill him and then emigrate to Rio, or a tropical island with no communications, or Alaska.  Anywhere he couldn’t find her, in fact.  “I don’t want to.”

“I can fix that.”  Meredith swirls her tongue over her lips.  After Beckett, it’s about as erotic as a dead dog.

“Meredith.”  She looks startled at the tone.  “No.”  He’s getting angry, and it shows.  “We are not doing this.  I am not doing this.  You need to leave.”  He recognises the signs of an impending storm, and moves swiftly to open the door and usher her out.  When she’s safely on the other side of a shut door, he breathes a huge sigh of relief.  He’s even more relieved when Ride of the Valkyries blares out and there’s a case.

* * *

 

This one is deeply, deeply weird.  What’s even more weird, though, is Castle’s behaviour.  He’s… skittish.  Nervous.  And considering that the case involves the potential for blood sacrifices, black magic and all the superstition and conspiracy that even Castle’s over-fertile imagination could conjure up, he’s not paying nearly the level of attention that he should be.  It’s all very peculiar.  Beckett shrugs mentally and gets on with the job.  At least he’s not annoying her, just for once.

“My ex-wife flew in last night,” he blurts.  “Alexis’s mother.  She came round this morning.”  Okay, that wasn’t what she expected to – what?

“Oh,” is all she says, discouragingly.  Gossip won’t help solve this murder.  Unconsciously, she retreats behind her mental shell, turning all her focus on to the corpse.  She doesn’t need to know anything about his ex-wife.  Satisfied there’s nothing more to learn for now, she’s ready to leave when  Castle suddenly returns to this reality and suggests they check his mouth for – a pouch?  What now?  Espo pulls a nasty little object from the corpse’s mouth.  Ugh.  Voodoo is very much not Beckett’s thing.  This is New York, not New Orleans or Haiti.  Here, dead is dead, and stays dead.  She hopes.  Zombies are not required.  One large, shambling, overly strong presence following her around all the time is quite sufficient.  Thinking of which, he’s remarkably quiet.

“What’s up, Castle?” she asks, once they’re on the way back from the scene.

“Meredith,” he replies gloomily, and relapses into silence.

Castle doesn’t say a word, all the way back to the Twelfth.  For someone who spends all his time talking, and mostly trying to seduce her with his words (and she doesn’t think about how three times now he’s succeeded, because she’s been trying very hard not to think how easy and how good it had been to give in, give up, lose control; and trying even harder not to think about how hot his words make her when he’s telling her she’s his and leaning over to dominate and take her and – No.  She is not thinking about this.) she is absolutely amazed to find that he can be quiet.  The only time he’s been quiet before is when his mouth is otherwise occupied – No.  Stop thinking about that, Kate.  Focus on the corpse.  The only game that matters now is finding the killer. 

Beckett says nothing too.  She’s wholly uninterested in Castle’s ex-wives; she’s very interested in the corpse.  Till they’ve found the killer, nothing else is relevant.  A few way-out theories wouldn’t hurt her thinking, but since they don’t seem to be arriving with their usual machine-gun rapidity she’ll do her own hypothesizing.  She’s perturbed to realise that the thought gives her no pleasure.  It should do.  Peace and quiet is what she likes, right?  She’s been regretting its loss for nearly seven weeks, every moment that Castle doesn’t stop talking.  Of course she likes the unusual quiet.  She runs over the hypotheses in her mind and is even more perturbed to find that it’s not as satisfying as it used to be: that she wants to discuss them.  With Castle.  She shoves that thought away and hypothesizes to herself all the harder. 

Her mind submerges into evidence and leads and theories, and by the time she’s back at her desk she has a list of matters to be investigated that will keep them all busy for hours.

* * *

 

A day later it’s all progressing okay, though not fast enough for Beckett’s liking, when there’s sudden noise and fuss and bustle behind her and a shrill statement of _No I am not going to wait downstairs; do you have any idea who pays your salaries?  Me and my taxes_ in an unpleasantly sharp and high-pitched tone.  She shrugs and assumes it’s someone else’s problem, feeling sorry for whichever detective has to deal with it.  Spoilt rich Manhattanite: she knows the type.  It’s a bit odd that the noise is approaching her murder board though… and hang on a moment, there’s another voice that’s vaguely familiar if she could just get past that apologetic tone and why is Castle looking deeply, deeply pained?  It all comes together in her head in one perfectly beautiful moment as for the first time ever she sees Castle wholly disconcerted and absolutely off his game.  It couldn’t get better, she thinks happily, grinning widely at Ryan and Espo, who are equally expansively grinning back – and then it does.  This must be his ex-wife. 

“Richard,” comes the same high pitched, somehow little-girl voice, “over here.”  Oh, this is just too perfect for words.  She’s Castle-hunting.  And boy oh boy does he look hunted.

“You know her?” grins Esposito, who’s clearly making some hefty assumptions about who – or what – this is, and her relationship to - or should that be with? – Castle.

“ ‘Fraid so,” mumbles Castle, who’s getting less and less suave with every syllable his ex utters.  He should be embarrassed.  This over-aged ingénue really, really doesn’t seem to have any redeeming features.  Well, except if you’re male.  Then she has at least two.

“Meredith, what a surprise.”  Yeah, Castle.  He really sounds happy about this surprise.  His enthusiasm for it could barely melt an ice cube.  She supposes it’s a nice change – or at least an amusing one – from his frequent bursts of hyperactive bounciness.

“I know, isn’t it great?  In LA no-one ever just stops by.  Don’tcha just love this town?” Surely she can’t be that brainless?  Castle _married_ this bimbette?  She’d thought he had more intelligence than that.  Or more taste.  She can’t resist the reply.

“More and more by the minute,” says Beckett sarcastically.  It goes right over Meredith’s head.  Much more satisfyingly, it hits Castle right in the solar plexus, if his pained breath is anything to go by.  Oh, this is just so much _fun **.**_   She hasn’t had this much fun since she was eight and at Coney Island.  Castle tries to smooth the situation a little.

“Meredith, these are Detectives Ryan, Esposito and Detective Beckett.”  Meredith eyes up both men and dismisses them as irrelevant.  Or more likely, under-walleted.  Her eyes stop on Beckett, then move on to Castle.  Beckett’s social smile acquires a degree of bite.  She knows how to deal with this.

“Oh, Beckett.  Your new muse.  Alexis told me all about it and I simply had to stop by.”  She stops looking at Castle in favour of a pitying stare at Beckett, but doesn’t drop the patronising I-saw-him-first tone.  “You know I was his inspiration once.”  Beckett’s not so sure what sort of inspiration that might be.  As far as her extensive knowledge of Castle’s books goes, he hasn’t used a bird-brained shopaholic redhead in any of his books.  Although she supposes he could always have gone in for soft porn under a pseudonym.  She’ll ask him.  When he’s just taken a drink, for preference.

“Were you now?”  Beckett doesn’t hide her disbelief.  Castle, it seems, clearly recognises the drawn battle line.  He looks like he wants to run.  Far, far away. 

“Still am, from time to time.  Right, kitten?” Meredith didn’t like the challenge, did she?  Beckett expects that she was head cheerleader, too.  But -

“Kitten?”

It’s perfect, just perfect.  He’ll never live this down.  _Kitten_?  She doesn’t even try to resist the evil smirk.  Every time he annoys her, she can use that.  She’s never seen him so embarrassed.  She’s never seen him embarrassed, till now.  Ryan and Esposito snort, not at all concealed.  From the looks on the boys’ faces, he’s going to be ragged from one end of the bullpen to the other.  Oh, revenge will be sweet.  Oh yes.  And even better, he knows what’s coming, and he can’t do anything about it.  She’s going to get her own back for every single second of irritation he’s caused her.  She’d hug herself with glee, and giggle, if it weren’t so college co-ed.  Not appropriate to a mature professional.  But her eyes are sparkling with mischief and she simply cannot stop smirking.  Every so often she smothers a splutter of laughter.

Castle can read Beckett’s thoughts like the headlines in the New York Times on the newsstands.  This is going to be dreadful.  She’ll use this against him for months.  And in public there is no way he can stop her.  In private, he’ll have his revenge.  He can see the mildly malicious, wholly mischievous, satisfaction bubbling all over her face.  Oh God.  He may never recover.  He cringes at the thought of the ridicule he’ll suffer, up and down the bullpen.  He can see it written all over the three cops’ faces.  By tomorrow there’ll be a plush cat from FAO Schwartz stuck on the back of his chair, or worse, a Hello Kitty cushion.  Oh God.

Then he thinks for a moment.  If – when, definitely when – they do josh him up and down the bullpen – it means he’s part of the team.  If he weren’t, they wouldn’t bother, they’d just treat him with civility.  He’s got a place here.  He’s really got a place here.  And he’s done it on his own efforts, no PR, no money applied. (well, except as regards coffee machines)  The precinct didn’t need him but he’s made a place for himself here.  He’s… he’s one of them.  He can honestly say he’s rarely been happier.

Happiness is marginally diluted when he realises Meredith is still present.  As is Alexis, who is looking both unhappy and uncomfortable.  He guesses Meredith pulled her out of school again. At least this time they’re both still in New York.  Meredith’s eyeing up the designer bag photo on the murder board, prattling about Sarah Jessica Parker and Sex in the City.  There’s only one form of Sex in the City he wants to know about and it involves neither Meredith nor Sarah Jessica Parker.


	24. I'll do what you want me to do

Beckett has returned her attention to her murder board, in high good humour with the world.  It’s such a good day, something will break soon and this case will be solved.  She doesn’t think much of his ex-wife, though.  She’s certainly beautiful.  Shame she’s self-absorbed and vacuous.  She recognises the  type; all fluff and fashion, probably a real bitch in bed, knows a few – or a lot of – cheap tricks.  Still beautiful, though.  Long hair.  She’s not had long hair for years.  Ten, in fact.  She’s not wanted it.  She doesn’t want it now.  And Castle watching his ex without taking his attention off her for a second doesn’t matter at all, because she’s not up for a relationship.  Especially it doesn’t matter, she realises with a not-at-all hidden grin, because he’s regarding Meredith with the same paralysed panic with which he would regard a grizzly bear growling six inches from his nose.  She goes back to the murder board.  Meredith is also eyeing the board.  Beckett bristles, as she notices that she’s – of course – eyeing up the designer purse.  Well, Beckett’ll just shut that down.

“This purse belonged to one of our victims.” So stop drooling over it.  It’s disrespectful to the victim.  Annoyingly, bimbette isn’t really bothered, though she pretends to be for the sake of appearances.

“That is so tragic.  More tragic, of course, if it had been the real thing, but still...”  Beckett wishes she would just lose the saccharine, dammit.  She doesn’t care.  It’s so annoying, and so insincere – wait.  What did she just say?

“You sayin’ this was fake?”  Esposito gets it out his mouth first.  Bimbette hasn’t even realised what she’s said, and is babbling on about total irrelevancies when they’ve caught a break and need to get on to it, right away. 

It’s not how she expected to catch a break.  If it solves her case, though, she doesn’t care if the break comes from cop work or luck or Castle or his bimbette ex-wife.  She’ll take it any way it comes.  But she still wishes that Meredith would go.  Her complete incomprehension about the work they do is tedious in the extreme and now that they’ve got the break they need it would be a really good idea if she left and let them get on with it.  Her voice is shredding Beckett’s ears and temper at equal speed.

“Look at the leather and the stitching.  It’s totally knock-off.  I mean, it’s good enough to fool the untrained shopper, but I have a retail eye.”  She might be implying that Beckett doesn’t.  Beckett really couldn’t care.  It’s a lead.  That’s all that matters.  And it starts to coalesce into usefulness.

“Canal Street.”

With only a very small amount of encouragement – well, her threat to shoot him if he doesn’t get his ex and his daughter (whose presence Beckett wouldn’t mind at all, because she would at least stay quiet and out the way, unlike _both_ her parents) out the precinct – Castle and accoutrements leave and Beckett and the boys get on with some serious cop work, to be ready in the morning for Canal Street.  No point going now, it’s getting late and the shops and stalls will be shut up before they get there.

Castle is not at all impressed by the day.  Meredith had been a mistake in the first place, and had not improved with the passage of time.  He’s not impressed by being hit on (if there’s any of that to be done, it will be by him.  To Beckett.); he’s furious that Meredith took Alexis out of school for any reason at all, and then it is insupportable to embarrass her further by bringing her to the precinct; and her attitude to his friends – yes, _friends_ – in the precinct was simply rude.  Not to mention the inevitable tension between her and Beckett.  There’s just no comparison, though.  Beckett is so immeasurably different: both beautiful, but in very different ways; but Beckett has intelligence and fire and verve – and is perfectly content to make it very clear she doesn’t need him in any way at all.  Like now.  He should be in the precinct with the team, but instead Beckett’s made it clear that he should leave.  Which is _also_ Meredith’s fault.  Some decisive action is clearly required, much as when he killed off Storm.   Castle is simply not having Meredith around, messing up his plans and not-so incidentally stoking Beckett to even higher levels of irritation and anger than she already inflicts upon him.  It’s difficult enough to make her come to him: further barriers are not required.  He makes a couple of calls: to his investment advisor and a friend in the right business, back on the West Coast.  That should do it: she’ll be out of New York by the end of the weekend and she’ll think it’s all her own talent that’s done it.  He’ll have his life arranged just the way he wants it.

* * *

 

Next day they’re at Canal Street to meet Esposito and Ryan and start chasing down the evidence.  Castle’s still rather quiet - embarrassed, Beckett thinks happily, which has certainly reduced the chatter quotient - but it doesn’t stop him standing and looming slightly closer than is appropriate any time he thinks he can get away with it, reminding her just how dangerously large he is.  In fact, he’s emitting rather more edge than he has done for a couple of weeks.  If he doesn’t quit the closeness before the boys notice, though, he’ll have an elbow in his gut, though she may just do that whether they notice anything or not.  This is not that sort of ... interaction.  That’s the word.  Interaction.  Because it is absolutely definitely not anything more.  Though he’s been getting fractionally more likeable, as he’s got more useful.  Fractionally.

The lock-up has been trashed.  At least, that’s what it looks like.  Every bag is shredded, and there’s another voodoo symbol on the floor.  Apparently it symbolises death.  How appropriate.  Unfortunately, death is not currently the first option on the list of approved arrest techniques (if it were, Castle would be dead already), but a last resort.  Thinking of which, where has Castle got to this time?

Castle turns out to be admiring himself on TV – arrogant jerk. “I really am ruggedly handsome, aren’t I?”  That’s not going to help solve the case.  (but he is, and she hates that she knows it, and that she knows just how good he looks under the clothes, too.)  She shakes her mind clear.  There must be a point to this.  Even Castle can’t be quite that vain.  Surely.  So why’s he looking at the screen – and what else has this camera been recording?  They go in to find out, and for a wonder the proprietor is actually happy to co-operate.  Eventually.  After Beckett’s been just a little snappish.  Of course Castle’s trying to improve her mood.  Not.

 “Her blood sugar’s low.  She gets a little cranky.”  Some people are too busy to stop for a three-course lunch, Castle.  The dead won’t wait.  Food will still be available later.  This is, after all, New York, where the takeout joints never sleep.  If he’s going to jab at her, though…

“Zip it, kitten.” It’s more irritable than she might have expected to be.  Maybe lunch would be a good idea, but she really does not have time.  There’s a lot to do.  Anyway, it’s had the desired effect.  Castle winces and shuts up.

A considerable amount of the day later, including a wholly botched raid on a warehouse which has resulted mainly in the suspect getting away, Beckett is fully focused on the case to avoid losing her temper.  Fortunately, Castle is also in a less-than-sunny mood, and is keeping very quiet.  So he should, because he’d deliberately ignored her order to stay clear of the situation and then his phone had rung and blown the whole raid to hell.  She could hardly be angrier about that.  She’d thought that he’d stopped messing up.  Clearly not.  She gives him the cold shoulder while the boys go through the camera evidence.

Castle is feeling miserably humiliated, which is a feeling he not only hates but thought he had got past in the Beckett context after he’d messed up with the nanny.  Even the boys are annoyed with him, and then when he couldn’t even identify the vehicle they’ve clearly decided that he’s a lot less use than he has been.  He doesn’t like the feeling of having screwed up, of failing, at all.  But there’s nothing he can do to sort it out right now.  At least he’s sorted out Meredith.  How she could ever have thought that he’d spot her more than a million dollars to stay here completely escapes him.

But then there’s a chance for at least some redemption.  The real cops have identified the likely next victim, but it’s Castle who’s in possession of the latest technology that enables them to find her.  It soothes his humiliated soul.  He’s still useful, still has a role.  But Beckett’s tense and hurried all the way to the woman’s door, and when he tries to suggest that he could break the door down she not only looks at him with no humour at all, but reduces him to a small pile of unnecessary waste by referring to him, yet again, as _kitten_.  That is starting to annoy him.  Beckett’s deliberately making him feel small, and useless, when he’s neither.

And then it all goes to hot lead and hell.  The woman – what an idiot – left her front door wide open for their perpetrator to walk in, gun up and trigger ready.  Castle just caught it in time to tackle Beckett to the floor, otherwise he guesses she’d be bleeding or dead right now.  All his sparring and gym work paid off: and he’s saved her life.  He had never expected to be able to. 

Gun battles, though, are not nearly as entertaining in reality as in the movies.  He’s no coward, but he is utterly astonished at the depth of courage it must take the cops to do their job, risking this and their lives every day.  He hadn’t appreciated it, till now.  The thought that his three cops could be killed is not pleasant.  And she just keeps trying to get a shot off, risking her life every time.  He can’t even assist: he doesn’t carry and short of making himself a target and being shot dead; which is really a step too far, though he’s sure that Beckett would still accept it if he offered; he is no help at all.  Beckett’s down to two rounds, and their position is not getting better.

“I need a clean shot,” Beckett complains.  _Complains_ , like being fired on is no more of an issue than a dripping faucet.  “I gotta get eyes on him.”  Finally, a way he can help.  He sticks his phone above the counter and snaps a photo.  Even that isn’t good enough.  She still can’t take the man down.  But then he has a brilliant idea.  It’s staring him in the face.  Bottles of champagne.  He knows exactly how to make this work: all those playboy years and parties.  Champagne can be made to open with a gunshot report, if you know how – and he does.  Oh yes, he does.  He can make as many fake shots as Beckett needs, and the perp will shoot every time he thinks she does.  They can draw him out of his hiding place, and Beckett will get the chance to take her clean shot.

It works.  One cork, one return fire – and two full in the chest to put the bad guy down.  That’s interesting, now it’s over.  The three adrenaline responses aren’t just a myth.  He’s been up for the fight, flight wasn’t an option, and the third is suddenly very strongly on his mind.

Beckett looks around the shot-up apartment and down at the immobilised bad guy.  Here they are now, a shot and badly injured perpetrator on the floor in front of them, and Castle’s done something undeniably useful that she couldn’t have done by herself: saved her life.  Then he gave her a chance to get the shot off cleanly and take down the crazed trafficker.  Interestingly, when it got to live action and hot lead; when push came to shove (she thinks about _shove_ ) he didn’t hesitate.  Not what she had expected from a writer, a celebrity.  There’s clearly a decent amount of guts in there to go along with his desire for glory.  Though he shouldn’t be stealing and drinking the champagne.   Not at all how the NYPD behaves.  Far too flamboyant (and far too sexy) for murder.   But that aside, he’s saved her life.  He had her back, just like Espo or Ryan would have, and he had it without even having a weapon, which certainly takes courage.  The unusual idea that she might trust someone settles into the very back of her mind, where she doesn’t notice it, as a team arrives to take the perp away.  She looks at Castle.  He looks half-terrified still, half-pumped.

 “You okay, Castle?”  He’s found a glass, and is bringing down his tension level with the assistance of some good champagne, seeing as the bottle was already open. 

“My first gun battle.”

 “Your last gun battle.” Beckett sounds as if she thinks it’s never going to happen again.  Castle isn’t nearly as sure about that.  There’s a lot of shadowing Beckett in his future.  There are bound to be more live-fire incidents.

“Don’t be so pessimistic. I think I handled myself pretty well.”

“Yup.  Probably saved my life.”

“Probably?  I definitelysaved your life.  And you know what that means, don’t you?”  Oh yes, she should do.  “It means you owe me.”  That’ll make her rise.   

“ _Owe you??  What?”_   She looks absolutely horrified at the idea.

 _“_ Whatever I want.” 

He wants a number of things.  Right now, he wants her up against the wall.  But there’s much more.  He wants her to tell him all of her story, to fill in the gaps in the file he’d read.  He wants her to stop pretending that he’s not important.  He wants her to stop keeping him at a distance, stop hiding behind a barrier, stop pretending she dislikes him outside bed.  He’s not going to let her keep doing any of that: he’ll break her shell and find the real Beckett underneath; make that Beckett his, too.  He needs to know more, take more, possess her body and her mind and _see_ all of her; own her and her story. 

“And you know exactly what I want, don’t you?” 

He’s moving in on her, and the tone belongs in a bedroom, not outside a shot-up apartment with blood on the floor and the paramedics just on their way out.  She looks up, clearly expecting him to say something entirely inappropriate and suggestive.  From the way she’s regarding him, in fact, she’s expecting him to _do_ something entirely inappropriate.  And he really, really wants to.   He wants to pull her in and plunder her mouth and then take her home and show her how life-threatening situations and that much adrenaline affect him.  He’s pretty certain, from the shade of her eyes and her parted lips, that she feels the same.  But he hasn’t forgotten how much grief she’s already given him courtesy of Meredith’s indiscretions, and maybe this is his best chance to squash that.  It’s old already.  He leans right in.

“You know what I really, really want you to do?”  And he’s close enough to kiss her and oh, kisses are what she’s expecting so he whispers in her ear, “Never, ever, call me kitten.”

And he struts off, smirking, leaving Beckett leaning on the wall and just for once wholly discombobulated.

When Beckett recovers herself and leaves the building, she finds Castle leaning on the cruiser, still smirking.  They get settled and she pulls out into the traffic.  Before Castle has a chance to start on any of the thoroughly inappropriate suggestions she is relatively sure are on his mind – she hasn’t missed his physical state, even if he didn’t kiss her – she’ll deal with him first.

“What’s wrong with calling you ‘kitten’?  It’s cute.”  Castle can hear the snigger behind the words.  “Very fitting – you know, all soft and fluffy.”  She smirks evilly.  “And small.”  He growls, not amused at all.

“I don’t like it.”  Beckett draws in a breath for another jab.  That’s not a good reason to stop ragging. 

“I don’t need to be reminded of that relationship, okay?”  There’s just enough force – and pain – behind the words for her to stop, step away.  She doesn’t want deliberately to hurt anyone, even Castle, whose capacity to annoy her remains unequalled.  She subsides.  Castle, on the other hand, carries on, a certain edge in his tone.  “And I’m not fluffy, soft, or small, Detective.  Of which I think _you_ need reminded.”  He drops his voice half an octave, letting sex and seduction slither through the car.  “Shall I show you, later?  Maybe when you’ve finished at the precinct you could come by, or I will, and we can discuss the finer points of description.  Accurate description is very important, you know.  I’ve always found that the best way to describe things accurately is to experience them.”  He smiles lazily.  “Size, shape, texture, hardness or softness, range of movement” – Beckett squirms in her seat – “sound…  You get the picture.”  Oh, she does.  She surely does.

“For example,” he murmurs.  Beckett suddenly realises what he’s about to do, and wishes fervently that she’d never told him that the cruiser doesn’t record sound.  “I could describe you, after our first date: pushed up against your own door, your lips dark red and swollen and parted, waiting for me; your eyes half-closed and dark, dazed with your own desire” – her breathing is quickening – “black smooth silk barely covering your breasts, the black silk triangle between your legs; black lace hold-ups on soft ivory skin, all just waiting to be tasted.”  She makes a very soft noise.  Castle’s lazy grin doesn’t falter.  “And when I stroked my fingers over your legs, all the way up those long, long legs, and you opened for me and pushed against me and you moaned for more” – another noise, and still the grin doesn’t change – “and when I touched you, you were wet and ready for me, and when I was inside you, you were tight and hot and fitting perfectly around me, and when you came you screamed for me.”  He’s brought her right to the edge, and he hasn’t laid a finger on her.  She can feel dampness at her centre, the hard clench of pelvic muscles.  She concentrates very hard on the street in front of her.

“You see what description can do, Beckett?  It can take you right into the story, make you feel everything as if it were real.  Shall we discuss descriptions further, later on?”  Or preferably in the next half hour, Beckett thinks, in a soundproof, windowless room somewhere they wouldn’t be disturbed.  But he hasn’t finished.

“I’ve brought you right into the story, haven’t I?  I think you’re right back there, pinned between the door and my body, writhing against me.  I think that if I reached over now and undid your so very formal dress pants and slipped my hand inside them I’d find you wearing more of that sinful silky lingerie.  I think if I slid my fingers down I’d find you soaking wet, wouldn’t I?  You’re all wet, right here and now, just for me, and if it weren’t for the cameras I’d give you what you want.”  He’s not smiling now.  The one quick flicked glance that’s all Beckett can spare from her frantic concentration on the traffic shows her the hungry, predatory look that only winds her tighter.  He’s just as hot for it as she is. “But I can’t.  You’ll have to wait until later.”  There’s a short silence. 

“Do you want to come over, later?  Everybody’s out.  Meredith’s going back to LA.”

“Yes,” she breathes out.  They’re pulling into the precinct garage.  As she switches the engine off, Castle speaks again, an undertone of instruction edging the velvet voice.

“Beckett, it’ll be more satisfying if you wait.”  Ohhh.  _This_ game.  She thinks she might like this game.  Deferred gratification can have some very… pleasurable… results.

“And if I don’t?”  The lazy, _I’m-in-charge_ grin is back.

“Consequences.”                                    

She doesn’t answer that.  If she does, they won’t make it out the garage.  Which has security cameras.  Heat builds as she considers letting him control the timing of her reactions.  Another step into those very inviting waters.  The midnight tide is tugging at her again, inviting her to let herself drown.  She smiles, very slowly.  She’ll give in on this, give him the control she wants him to have, but by the time she’s got to Castle’s she’ll be ready to even the score.  She’ll test his control of himself, too.

But first, the paperwork, the perp to process, tidy away the loose ends of the case.  Finish it off, properly: that’s the priority.  As ever, it takes a while.  It’s past dark when she leaves, later than she expected. She goes home, planning on the journey, showers quickly, resisting the temptation that clutches at her as she does, puts on the outfit she’d decided on the way home would be most suitable.


	25. We can't stop, and we won't stop

When there’s finally a rap on his door, Castle is wound rather tighter than he’d like.  He might have thought that talking dirty in the car would be a good game, but not if it leaves him in this state.  He’d   expected Beckett some time ago, as well, and although he’s sure that she’s been at work he doesn’t like being reminded that he’s not sufficiently important to her that she’d make any effort to hurry: doesn’t like the sharp jab of memory and _I don’t want a relationship_.  He’ll show her why she should.

When she comes in she’s not dressed as he had expected, either.  Based on previous experience of her tactics, he’d expected something that would make it absolutely clear she was out to drive him insane.  He’d looked forward to it, and been prepared for it.  Instead, she’s wearing black jeans, flat shoes and a plain white scoop-necked T-shirt under a soft leather jacket, as casual as he’s ever seen her.  He’s wrong-footed by it, immediately.  And she spots it, immediately.

“I’m off-duty, Castle.”  She grins, wholly sure of herself, hands him her jacket to be hung up.  “I even left my gun at home.”  He’s momentarily distracted.

“What happens if you get a call?”  Beckett acquires a very slight air of irritation. 

“Depending on where it is, I go home and pick it up or I get my spare from the precinct on the way.  I shouldn’t get a call, though.  I’m off-duty.”  Castle thinks that that has nothing to do with whether she responds to a call or not.  He hasn’t noticed that she’s ever really off-duty.  Still, it’s very encouraging.

“Wine?  Coffee?  Something else?”  He puts a hand over her back to steer her to the couch.  At that point he discovers his first misapprehension.  The deceptively simple white T-shirt is soft, heavy silk, and infinitely tactile.  He’ll stroke it, he decides, just as soon as he’s been a polite host.  And then it occurs to him to wonder about the rest of her clothes.  Specifically, what’s _under_ the casual look.  Look.  Not necessarily reality.  She’s playing him, again.  He runs a firm hand over the silk, up and down again, and smiles darkly as she curves very slightly into his touch.  Two can play at this game.  It’s only fun with two.  He strokes again, slightly harder, turning her into him.

“I thought you were offering me a drink?”

He tugs her against him, holds her there; not that she’s pulling away.  “You haven’t told me what you want.”  She’s fairly certain he doesn’t just mean the choice of drink.  He’s still running his hand over her back, down to just shy of the curve of her ass.  It’s almost hypnotic.  She’s not sure who’s more likely to be mesmerised by it.  She makes the mistake of looking up to answer.  Heat and hunger are flaring in his eyes and she feels response tightening her nipples and swirling through her blood.  And then his mouth is on her and she opens to receive him and all the repressed desire that he’d built up in her in the cruiser and she’d kept rammed down as she finished the case paperwork explodes. 

It’s just as well, Castle thinks with the very small portion of his mind that can still function, that he’s a big man and that he works out.  Aggressive Beckett is a force to be reckoned with.  She’s fought her way into dominating his mouth and she’s pulled his head down and he is certain that seconds ago his shirt was buttoned.  It’s not buttoned now.  No.  This is not the way he intends this to go.  He catches Beckett’s delicate, destructive hands before she can get any further, holds them in one of his behind her back, slowing her down; runs his other hand into the nape of her neck and the short hair there, angles her head to his satisfaction and proceeds to keep her in place while he explores her mouth, reversing her domination and proving beyond all doubt that he’s able to give her what she wants as she stops fighting him and arches in.  Finally he lifts his head.

“What do you want, Beckett?  You seem a little hot and bothered.”

“Shut up and kiss me, Castle.”  Well.  That’s not very subtle.  Nor is the way she’s moving against him.  He smiles slowly and darkly at her.

“Uh-uh.  It’s nice to know that you waited, like I asked.”  He feels the shudder as that registers, followed by an irritable growl _– Don’t like being read, do you, Beckett?_ – as she tries to tug her hands free.  “Uh-uh,” he says again.  “You don’t get to do that.”  She growls again.  This time it’s not quite as irritable.  More sexy.  “We were going to discuss description, weren’t we?”

He walks them over to the couch and lets go of Beckett’s hands to sit, grasps her waist to pull her down on to his lap, where he can keep her tight against him with one arm round her, stroking her shirt sensually.

“What should I describe?” he murmurs.  “Maybe the texture of your shirt?”  He slides his free hand over it slowly, across her shoulder, down the centre of her cleavage, carefully missing her breasts, over her taut abs.  “The way it slithers under my fingertips, almost as if it’s wet?  The way it moves across you, delineating all your curves” – there’s a featherlight touch against the undercurve of her breast, pointing his moral – “the way it invites further touches, strokes?  Or should I describe the way it invites me to find out if the skin beneath it is as soft and silky as the fabric covering it?”  He untucks the shirt from the waistband of her jeans, and slips his hand underneath to lie on her stomach, circling gently.  In return, Beckett draws cool fingers over his revealed skin from clavicle to navel, and listens to the harsher breathing with satisfaction.  But Castle keeps talking, and it’s settling over her, seeping slowly into her skin and nerves, replacing the blood in her veins with heat.  One finger from his large hand skates over the black denim.

“I could describe the contrast between the roughness of the denim and the smoothness beneath it, under my fingers.”  Said finger slips down beneath her waistband, spanning from the edge of her ribs almost to the rim of her panties.  Beckett squirms in anticipation, and feels Castle’s own hard arousal pressing against her; the reflexive tightening of his arm to bring her closer in.  She scrapes over his chest again, adding a very slight edge of nail; hearing the indrawn breath as she runs further down than previously, undoes the belt, approaches the button of his pants when Castle stops her.

“You don’t get that…yet.”  He dips and kisses her, replacing his hand where he’d left off, takes her mouth deeply and feels her hands come up to bite into the hard muscle of his shoulders, undoes her jeans in one swift decisive movement.  “Patience, Beckett.  All in good time.  I know what you want.”  Wicked fingers slip over the fabric he’s revealed.  “Another contrast.  Lace, under denim.  Sensual, under casual.”  He flicks fingertips back upwards, pauses, glides his palm over her bra. “And more lace.  A little …roughness, under the smooth surface.  Is that what you want?”  He kisses her again, much harder: sure, searching, dominating; and suddenly she gives in and opens fully to him and that’s interesting, the small analytical portion of his mind notes: she likes a little forcefulness.  A little more to explore, to check.  A subject for discussion, and agreement.  And then he stops thinking and analysing because there is only her mouth and her body and her reactions fuelling his actions and the most primitive contrasts of all.  He pulls her T-shirt off and she drags him down to her so he can nip and soothe, suck and bite gently and slide her off his lap as he takes her jeans down with his movement and _what the fuck_ she’s put on stockings and he rips her panties down and _oh she’s so wet_ and he slides two hard fingers into her and plunders her mouth again and she’s under him on his couch and moaning and as he circles his thumb across her she’s screaming _faster harder please Castle_ and he – stops.

“Not yet, Beckett,” he rasps.  “Not here.”  And he simply picks her up and carries her to the bedroom, all house rules long since forgotten, ever since the conversation in the cruiser; drops her on the bed and removes first the tangle of shoes, jeans and panties, leaving her spread across his coverlet in lace bra and _fuck-me_ stockings, and then his own clothes; dragging his hot gaze over her till she’s even more restless and breathing harder.  She’s an open, wanton invitation to the forbidden.  When she speaks it’s the ripple of tearing silk.

“Like what you see?”  There’s an underlay of sharp, denied need, remnants of how he’s edged her, now and earlier.  She moves enticingly.

“Oh, yes.  I like it.  I like you like this.”  He leans over her and nudges her legs apart.  “How much of a bad girl are you, Beckett?  Because I think you’re very bad indeed.  Nice girls don’t wear these.”  He flirts his tongue over the tops of the stockings, draws it slowly upward and pauses.  “What shall I do now, Beckett?”  He flicks over her before she can answer, and she moves against him.   “I could keep you on the edge for a while longer.”  He looks up, drops to a predatory growl.  “Or a lot longer.”  He licks again.  “Is that a game you like, Beckett?”  And again he doesn’t give her the chance to answer, plays with lips and teeth and tongue until she’s right on the edge again and alternately begging him to let her come and threatening him if he doesn’t.

When he stops again, her profane, prolific threats notwithstanding, and slides up next to her, she’d be ready to kill him except that no-one’s made her feel this good, ever.  She can’t catch her breath to speak beyond disconnected words, chiefly _more_ and _please_ , and he’s still playing gently with her to keep her writhing against his fingers and whimpering whenever she can’t prevent her mouth making the noise.  It’s clear he’s got more in mind than the hard rough fabulously frantic sex that’s previously been the case.  She sinks into the ability to give in, give up, give over the lead completely and submit to her own need and someone else’s control, in the way she’s not dared to in years.  Ten years.  Ten years since she trusted anyone this far.  (but it’s not a relationship.  Absolutely not.  It’s only in bed.)  He’s using that deep bedroom voice on her again, velvet suggestions to invoke all the dark delights she might want, let her know that he’s prepared to take her anywhere, everywhere, she’s happy to go.   She should be horrified at how well he’s read her, how quickly he’s seen her secrets, but she really does not care while he’s touching her like this and flicking all her switches.

“So, Beckett, let’s sum up how you like it.  Add up all the clues, and solve this mystery.”  He dances his fingers over and into her.

“Don’t think you know me,” she chokes out, gasping.

“I’d never say that,” he grins, strokes over a spot that leaves her wordless.  “But I think I know what you like.  You can tell me if I’m wrong.”  He pauses, smiles diabolically down at her.  “If you can talk, that is.”  He glides in and out some more, hitting the perfect spot each time, till she calls him some names he wouldn’t expect to hear coming out her mouth and pleads for more.  He’s perfectly happy to wait for his own pleasure.  They’ll have all night, and by the end of it she’ll unquestionably be addicted to him.

“You like being held down, and in place.  You like restraints.  You like it rough, some force.  You like someone else in charge, you like someone edging you.  In fact, my dear Detective, you like being on the bottom.  In bed.  It’s the only place you don’t always need to be in control.”  He observes her carefully.  “But you’re not too deeply into that scene.  Just enough to escape from your demons.  Just enough to let go.”  He stops teasing her for long enough to let her catch her breath.

“What’s your safe word, Beckett?”

“Cinnamon.”  And with that she drops the last pretence that he hasn’t called her right and hands over control of the whole game to Castle.  He takes immediate advantage, pinning her wrists above her head and kissing and stroking her till she writhes and whimpers _please Castle_ , _more please_ and he intended to make her wait but it’s been more and more difficult for him to stop and bring her back so this time he doesn’t and can’t help but make her shatter under his hands and lips.

When she opens her eyes again she’s cuddled in close.  She thinks, with the miniature part of her brain which is not completely fried by earth-shatteringly good orgasm, that it might be … interesting… to play with Castle for a while.  She’s given him control, but that doesn’t mean passivity.  That wouldn’t be any fun at all.  Either he’ll let her, or he’ll stop her.  Either works for her.  She starts with the conveniently located nipple in front of her, nibbles gently as an opening gambit.  When his arms tighten in reflex, she nips harder, and takes the slight gasp as only her due.  She scrapes nail tips down across the hard muscles of his chest, and notes with some interest that Castle clearly likes that.  He might like being on top, (she likes him being on top) but he isn’t fanatical about it.  She trails her fingers lower until she can take him firmly in hand, as it were, and see how close to the edge she can bring him before he snaps.  One way or the other.  Turnabout is, after all, fair play and she has several hours to make up for.

It takes less time than she’d expected to break him.  He survives her questing fingers with barely a twitch of his infuriating smirk, but once she puts her mouth on him, takes him in and uses tongue and then teeth to lend an edge of danger, he’s groaning in almost no time and _how did she do that_ she’s fracturing his control already and _I’m supposed to be in charge here she yielded to me_ he may not survive this and _no! don’t stop_ she’s stopped.  He doesn’t want her to stop.  And she’s smirking at him from lower down the bed and _okay that is enough_.   Time to change the game back.

Beckett finds herself flat on her back in a pile of pillows with Castle firmly on top of her and pressing her down.  She doesn’t know quite how that happened. 

“I see,” Castle says teasingly. “You like someone else in charge, but you only give in to them when you’re made to?”  He slides against her.  She squirms under him in response, and he kisses her hungrily.  “You want to fight it, don’t you?  Right up till you can’t fight any more.”   Her eyes are dark, dilated; her lips are reddened well beyond the effects of lip gloss.  “You don’t concede until someone’s conquered you.”  He’d written his private Detective better than he’d guessed.  He slides again, teasing through the slick flesh beneath him, places her hands by her head and takes the majority of his own weight on his elbows.  “And I have.  Haven’t I, Beckett?”  She shakes her head, and he can see argument rising in her throat.   He kisses her deeply again before she can start to argue, eliciting a very different response.  When he lifts from her lips he smiles down slowly and lazily, wholly sure of his ground.

“Let’s play, Beckett.”  He shifts his weight to one side, tucking one of Beckett’s arms under him and catching her other hand with the arm that he’s insinuated around her neck, leaving her open to his other searching hand, slides it over her collarbone and very slowly further down to the edge of her bra.  She pulls against his grip, not succeeding in loosening it, essays a movement to bring his hand where she wants it, fails again. 

“Touch me, Castle.”  He runs a finger lightly between her breasts.  “Properly.” 

“That’s not up to you, Beckett.  It’s up to me.  You’re mine now.”  Possession drips from each syllable, and his hand slips firmly across to palm her breast harder, a little roughly, a little reminder that she’s held in by his strength and size, a little reminder that he’s in control.  She’s breathing harder, choppily, as he runs his free hand down over her hip, her fine cut quadriceps, over the lace top of the stockings she’s still wearing, comes back up to reach under her and unclip her bra.  He removes it gently, never letting her go long enough for her to try to fight back, and then takes her nipple in his mouth and sucks till she begins to moan again.  He trails fingers down and into the wet heat, plays with her until she’s pushing against his hand, trails his fingers back up her body and slips them into her mouth for her to suck on.  When he takes them away she whimpers and tries to bring one long leg up around him so that she can slide over the breadth of his thigh and rub against his hard weight. 

“Not yet.  I’ll give you what you need.”  He pushes her down again and rises over her to position himself.  She writhes against him.

“Now, Castle.”  She wants him inside her so badly.           

“Do you want me?” She’s so close, and he’s teasing, and it’s so close to her edgy dreams and fantasies: a big man taking her higher at his pace, not hers, keeping her waiting, holding her down.  She lets the dark water close over her head. 

“Yes.  Now, Castle.  Please.”

“Are you mine?  Say it.”  This time she is going to admit it in terms.  He’s not a sex toy, there because she wants release (he doesn’t think about his own past attitudes) and he’s convenient.  She’s his, and there is more to this than a quick fuck or a slow one.  He pushes a little way into her, and she jerks up into him, her body tight and hot under him and around him and the slight scrape of the lace at her thigh rubbing against him and he’s beginning to lose it because making her wait means making him wait and _dammit_ he’s been waiting all day too and she’s come once and he has – not.  He pushes all the way in, hard, fast, and she mewls and squirms and can’t move more than he allows. 

“You’re mine.  Say it, Beckett.”  She mewls again, not even capable of a moan, desperate for him to move, but he’s filling her: thick and hard and long and _please Castle, please_ and “Not until you admit it” and _fuck_ she wants this – she wants _him_ – but she’s never given anybody that concession ever in the ten years of her adult life no matter how deep she’d paddled in the pool.  Not Sorenson, who at one time she’d almost thought she might marry, till that fell apart for so many reasons, not anyone else.  He moves a tiny amount, enough to please himself but not satisfy her, and again, and again, and _fuck_ he really means to leave her here on the edge and come himself and she could stop this with her safe word if she wanted but she doesn’t want that either and she needs _him_ and right now she’ll say almost anything if he’ll just stop teasing her and do this properly and _oh please, please_ and it’s just another part of the game and doesn’t mean anything and –

“Yours,” falls out of her mouth.  And then he moves _properly_ and thrusts in and withdraws and in again and after that the world dissolves white around her.


	26. What you doin' in your bed?

Castle’s holding her close again, turned over so that she’s on top.  She’s tired, now playtime’s over.  Time to go home.  She tries to roll off him, but he’s not letting go.

“Lemme go,” she yawns.  “I need to go home.  ‘M tired.”  She makes another attempt to move away.

“Why’d you need to go home?  Stay here.  Much better.”

Castle is not at all impressed by her idea.  He’s finally got the next stage of what he wanted, and it’s all going to be spoilt because she won’t stay with him.  She’s admitted she’s his; she’s given in to him, let him take her deeper into the water; and she won’t stay?  No.  Time for some enjoyable, delicate persuasion, he thinks.  He runs a warm hand over her back and down, slides her leg up around his waist, strokes wickedly along her inner thigh. 

“You sure you wanna go home?  I think you should stay here, let me keep you warm.”  He turns her fully into his chest, and pulls a cover over them both.  “See?  Just what you want.”  He slides hard fingertips a little further, tantalisingly.  “I want you to stay.  I’ll show you why you should.”  Dark suggestion slithers under his tone to slink over her skin, settle into her synapses.  Seduction lounges languorously about her, and temptation whispers in her ear.  Just a little while longer, it murmurs, just a little longer under his possessive, wicked hands would be so good.

“Show me,” she purrs, and nips gently at him where her mouth lies against his clavicle.  “Show me then, Castle.”

And he does, all over again, until she bites nails into his back and claws him closer, deeper; screams out his name and lets him own her; and despite all of her intentions falls asleep in the nest of his arms, just where, and how, she should be.

When she wakes, some time past midnight, it’s because she’s cold.  Castle’s stolen the whole of the comforter, most of the pillows and all but six inches of the enormous bed; and he’s not wrapped round her to keep her warm any more.  It seems like a good time to take her leave.  She quietly dresses partway with such clothes as made it into the bedroom, wincing slightly and contemplating a hot soak with plenty of bath salts; leaves a hastily scrawled note on the nightstand next to him, picks up her shoes and slips out of the room; snags her T-shirt, jacket and purse in the main room; finishes dressing and sneaks silently out of the door.  She’ll definitely need a long, hot bath before she starts her day tomorrow, but the remaining slight ache along her thighs and deep into her core is a pleasurable reminder of the hot night just finished.  She’s home and in her own bed less than half an hour later, sound asleep.  Her dreams scorch through her slumber, every detail amplified and repeated; outlining games they haven’t played yet.  But in her fantasies, they do, and she blazes, twisting and moaning in her sleep. 

It never occurs to her that Castle expected her to stay the whole night.  Even if it had, she wouldn’t have stayed.  That’s far too close to getting involved in a relationship, and neither of them want that.  They’d each said so.  She hasn’t noticed that that isn’t what Castle said.  She hasn’t noticed that he carefully omitted that part. 

Castle wakes at false dawn, dim light trickling into his bedroom where the curtains are still wide open, searching around him for Beckett.  He sits up, looks around, listens.  She’s not there, not in the bathroom; when he stumbles out of bed she’s not sleeping on his couch, as she had on hers.  Her clothes are gone, he perceives.  _She’s_ gone.  He goes back to his room, and notices the paper on his nightstand.

_Castle.  Gone home.  See you. Beckett._

What the _hell_?  No.  No fucking way.  She is not doing this again.  She did this at hers, but at least then she hadn’t left the building and he could take her back.  This time he’s more than a little mad.  He’s absolutely furious.  What is her problem with just staying with him?  It’s not as if she isn’t enjoying it: he’s sure of that.  She’s given in to him, admitted she’s his.  So she should _stay put_.  Stay put and let him make her feel so good in all the ways he knows she’ll like.  _Next time_ , whispers a dark little voice from a primitive corner of his mind, _next time use her own handcuffs on her._   The thought is so very, very appealing, in so very, very many ways.  It’s certainly worth considering.  Mutually.

It never occurs to Castle that Beckett might have regarded admitting she’s his as merely part of the game, only applicable to this time and this place. He’s so blinded by his still obsessive need to have her with him that any assumption other than that she’s getting fully involved simply doesn’t hit his brain.  And why should it?  He’s never failed to get everything he wanted, all his dreams have always come true.  Just like this one’s coming true.

He returns to his bed, breathing in the scent of sex and Beckett, falls back asleep to hot hard dreams of everything that they might do together; gentler reveries of her cuddled up close, soft and warm and always, always where she ought to be: right next to him.

* * *

 

Castle means to find Beckett the next day and _discuss_ (so to speak) the finer points of bedroom etiquette: in particular his strong preference that she stay around afterwards; but somewhere in between the need to be in when Alexis returns from her sleepover, the chaos attendant on his mother’s walk of shame and, worse, her apparent need to tell him slightly more than he has any desire to know, and a sudden inspiration that sends him full tilt towards his keyboard and doesn’t wear off until several hours later, he finds that it’s nearly evening.  He also finds that he’s still not pleased with the outcome of the previous night, when he reads back what he’s written.  Nikki and Rook are not getting along well, in this section.  They’re fighting over trivial things, staying apart when they should be together (nothing Freudian about that slip) and generally butting heads at every opportunity.  It’s good writing (he is always honest with himself about the standard of his writing) but he’s dancing on the tightrope of including emotions that have nothing to do with Nikki and Rook and everything to do with Castle and Beckett with every further chapter that he writes.  How to show her that she should want more than a succession of one night stands, more than a short affair?

Oh.

What happened there?  Four days ago he hadn’t worried about that: hadn’t even been sure that he wanted any sort of an affair, let alone a long term affair.  But that had been before he’d seen her put her life on the line, before he’d dived to save her, before they’d – together, one team, _partners_ – taken down the bad guy with the bullets flying and a very uncomfortably real risk that either or both of them would end up injured or dead.  Only yesterday, he could have lost Beckett, before he’d really found her.  And that event, that thought, that possible outcome, has kicked his thinking into overdrive.  He does want something that lasts longer.  He’ll decide how long it lasts, not some crazed criminal with a gun.  He’s saved her life, put his brains and his muscle and reactions to good use: achieved something that _matters_ , outside the celebrity bubble.  He’s almost surprised by how quietly secure that makes him feel.  It’s all very well being pack alpha over the jackals and vultures that attend celebrity, wealth and fame.  It’s quite different when you prove it by protecting the alpha lioness, because she actually needs help, not because you think she should want you to take care of her, not because it makes you feel good to look as if you’re shielding a beautiful woman from trouble, not because you assume she needs protection.  Because she’s going to risk her own life every time the job demands it, and _dammit_ she will not do it without him there beside her.

She will _not_. 

Quietly, unobtrusively winding into the back of his mind where he doesn’t notice its insinuations, is a considerable change in tone.  Six weeks being constantly around the Twelfth has altered him, already. Being around cops, who don’t care about money or status, but who care very deeply about taking down the _right_ bad guy, (it would have been so easy for Beckett to stick with the crazed fan, ignore Alison Tisdale’s brother, but she wanted the _right_ answer, not the easy one)  who banter and josh and use some very politically incorrect terms indeed – but who put their lives on the line for unappreciative strangers, and have each other’s backs, every day; without complaint and indeed with enthusiasm – Esposito taking down a bad guy is definitely enthusiastic.  They are, in short, sincere.  True good guys.  And it’s rubbed off on him in a way he hasn’t noticed and would never, if asked, have expected.  Though he doesn’t consciously know it, he’s begun, and in fact is some considerable way past _begun_ , to lose the shallow, _anything I want as soon as I want it and drop it when I’m bored_ attitude that has defined the last twenty years of his life, outside his own front door.  He’s becoming a different man.

He’s still annoyed with Beckett, though.  She shouldn’t have sneaked out, gone home.  She should have stayed.  She’s his.  She said she was.  So she should have stayed.  Next time, he’ll make sure she stays.  This time, he wants an explanation.  The idea that Beckett might not feel that she owes him an explanation doesn’t reach his cortex.  He taps out a carefully composed text.  _Missed you this morning.  You should’ve stuck around._   He’ll see what that brings.  But tomorrow, he’ll have an explanation.  No-one’s ever gone home on him.  Oh.  That’s because no-one’s ever been here before, that he wasn’t actually married to.  No-one, ever.  Another rule that Beckett’s shattered, and he hadn’t even noticed.  He’d only worried about no-one being home so that they had privacy, not to protect Alexis.

Ah.  That’s another thing.  Beckett hasn’t really noticed Alexis, any time.  Others have tried to make nice about her, and even with her, tried to get to him through his daughter.  He’s stopped that short.  Beckett, though, isn’t trying to make any sort of impression on Alexis.  Ordinary civility, appropriate to a polite teen, yes.  But, as ever, Beckett was simply focused on the case, and Alexis was irrelevant to that.  He doesn’t know if he’s hurt that she isn’t striving to get to know his family or relieved that she isn’t.  It’s not relevant, anyway.  It’s not as if they’re going to come into close contact.

Beckett reads Castle’s text with a hint of irritation.  She doesn’t appreciate him trying to suggest she should have stayed.  They both know this isn’t a snuggly, cuddly, fluffy relationship.  She’s not up for publicity, anyway, or walks of shame past his family.  She’d rather go home, be home, alone, in her own space, where explanations of any sort will not be required.  She doesn’t answer to anyone about, or indeed reveal, her personal life, and she’s not going to get into a position where that might change.  She leaves the text unanswered, and continues with her quiet Sunday evening, planning for the week ahead.

* * *

Plans are, as ever, flexed when a grisly body is found late Monday evening stuffed in a safe, broken and mutilated, missing a finger.  A home invasion, carried out with considerable brutality, and some very valuable jewellery drifting in the wind.  Beckett, slightly reluctantly, calls Castle.  She’d have preferred a couple of days more without him, after the weekend.  It all seems to have become more than a little intense, and she’d rather forget – and hope Castle forgets – any admissions she might have made in the heat of the moment about being his.  She doesn’t want to be anyone’s, she doesn’t want a relationship, and Castle in possessive mode should be kept strictly confined to the bedroom.  There, it’s hot.  Outside, not so much.  Not at all, in fact.

Initial study of the crime scene undertaken, body removed to the morgue with Lanie crooning over it (it’s really rather creepy at times, how she talks to the dead), Beckett realises with resignation that she is not going to be able to continue for much longer avoiding Castle’s oppressively intent gaze and clear desire to discuss her departure from his loft.  He’s been trying to corner her for some time, despite the need to get on with the job, and she’s tired of the dance.  She doesn’t see that there’s a need to talk about it, or about anything.  She briefly considers making the boys take him with them, but that will only work for one trip and she’ll spend the next two hours on evasive manoeuvres if she does.  She grits her teeth and prepares to shoulder a wagonload of irritation. 

She’s not wrong.  Castle starts as soon as she’s pulled out into the cursedly slow-moving traffic.

“You didn’t answer my text.”

“What text?”  That’s wholly disingenuous.  She knows exactly which text.  He’s only sent one, since Saturday night.  Still, let him think she gets thousands of texts, instead of very few.

“The one I sent yesterday,” he points out, as if she should know instantly.   Beckett pretends to think.

“Oh,” she says with an air of sudden recognition, “that text.  It didn’t ask any questions so it didn’t need an answer.” 

Castle grinds his teeth audibly.  Beckett looks wholly innocent and concentrates on the almost-gridlocked traffic.

“You sneaked off without a word.”  He only just manages not to say _You were supposed to stay._ Or worse, _I wanted you to stay_.  Or still worse _You have to stay with me._   He has to remember that she _says_ she doesn’t want taken care of, nor does she want a relationship.  He has to remember that he needs to make her think that neither does he.

“You were asleep,” she says airily.  “It would have been a shame to wake you, so I left a note.”  She makes it sound so utterly reasonable and normal and not something that should upset anyone in any way at all.  “You’re really cute when you’re asleep.  You look so much younger with all your wrinkles smoothed out.”  Castle squawks, then recovers.  She’s trying to divert his attention.  It’s not going to work.

“You didn’t have to go.  You could have stayed.”  There’s a short silence, during which the tension perceptibly grows.  When Beckett answers, her tone has altered: less airy, more direct.

“I wanted to go home.  Sleepovers are for kids.” 

“You didn’t say that when I stayed at yours.”  He’s beginning to sound childishly sulky.

“I didn’t expect you to stay,” she says casually.  It’s only one semitone away from _I didn’t want you to stay_.

“Well, I expected you to stay.  I thought we’d sorted that point out at yours.”

“What point?”  She has no idea what he means.

“That you stay put.  Or I make you stay put.”  As soon as it falls out his unregulated mouth, he expects fireworks.  Instead, she laughs.

“Seriously?  You meant it?”  What?  She sounds as if she hadn’t even considered that he might have meant it.  “That was just for that night.”  That’s not even a hint of a question at all.  No, it wasn’t _just for that night_.  It was a statement of how it was going to be.  And he has just enough sense and control not to say that here and now, because being dumped out at the side of the road will do nothing to advance his strategy.

He’s floundering, again.  He used to be calm, smooth and always, always in control.  When he got himself into the Twelfth, he thought that he was in command of the situation.  When he pinned Beckett to the mat in sparring, won the bet and took her out to dinner, he thought he was in charge.  Even when they exploded into scorching sex, it was all still on track.  Except it wasn’t, and it isn’t.  It never has been.  Everything he knew, or thought he knew, doesn’t apply.  She confounds him at every turn, leaves him struggling in her wake, and she doesn’t even know that she does it.  He needs to regroup right now, because this is about to go horribly, horribly wrong.  Trying to be protective doesn’t work.  Trying to be possessive certainly won’t.  Being irritating will at least lower the temperature.

“Well, I’d meant it as a continuing invitation, but if you want a fresh invitation each time I’m sure I can arrange it,” he oozes, smirking.  It works.  Beckett rolls her eyes but the danger is temporarily averted.  He oozes some more.  “Or you could just invite me.”

“Manners, Castle,” Beckett raps, though it’s her normal level of irritation.  “Well-brought up people don’t demand invitations.  They wait till they’re asked.”

“I don’t like waiting.  It’s boring.  I don’t do boring.  Especially when there are so many interesting ways to spend my time.”  He wriggles his eyebrows and leers villainously.

“Patience is a virtue, Castle.  You might as well cultivate _one_ virtue.  Though it’s gonna be really lonely, hanging around with all your vices.”

Castle growls very softly, which goes straight from Beckett’s ears downwards.  “Here I thought you liked my vices, Beckett.  Especially when they match yours so very neatly.”  Oh, that’s a low blow.  Especially in that voice.  Certain mutually acceptable vices swim up into her conscious mind.  However.

“We have a case, Castle.  That’s more important than your overactive imagination.”  She can feel his assessing gaze.  

“I don’t think it’s my imagination that’s overactive, right now.”  He pauses meaningfully.  “You’re blushing, Beckett.  Thinking naughty thoughts, are you?”  Smooth molasses slides over her, coating her nerves.  “Maybe you’d like to come out to play?”  And that is just entirely unfair, because the case comes first and she doesn’t want to be induced to think about anything else till it’s done.  She has to give the case her full attention, deliver justice for the dead.

“I have a case.  No time.”

It’s true.  She doesn’t shift from the precinct for any length of time.  The boys go home, and she stays on, relentlessly hunting for connections until she can’t prop her eyes open any longer; starting again too few hours of haunted sleep later.  Underneath it all, she’s proving to herself that she’s still as good, as focused, as determined and diligent as she ever has been; that nothing interferes with her work.  She doesn’t ask herself why she feels the need to do so, at the expense of all other possibilities, when for much of the time she’s spinning her wheels, repeating lines of enquiry she’s already exhausted.

Castle comes by the precinct for extended periods of observation; meaning in fact extended periods of feeding his obsession and fantasising about taking Beckett home with him, which only leave him mentally and physically frustrated; but though Beckett seems to appreciate his visits – or at least she doesn’t threaten to maim or kill him more than once per hour – there’s no hint at all that she might want a more intimate form of company, and any time he implies the possibility he’s shut down hard.  He doesn’t like this case, he decides.  In other cases, there’s been more room for him to speculate and theorise and help and most importantly be involved.  And of course to flirt and annoy Beckett until she shifts from irritation to anger to hot and then to the physical.  So far on this one there’s nothing to theorise about, and no involvement. 

The fewer results there are, the more Beckett retreats into her own little world where there is nothing and no-one but the case, and the more tension there is around her desk in the bullpen.  He’d like to take her away from it, even for an hour, relax her.  But there’s not a single opportunity, not a chance for that to happen, and with every hour that she passes in the precinct she’s strung more tightly.


	27. Sleeping in my memory

It takes three days for them to run out of data gathering: to finish tracking down previous robberies, where no death had intervened; to prise the papers out of the other precincts and then to make contact with the victim’s daughter and invite her in for a second discussion.  The only pattern is that there is no pattern, no connection outside the enormously expensive jewellery that’s been stolen, unless you count the escalating level of violence. 

Castle’s  interestedly watching Beckett interview the daughter, who is wholly unimpressed that there have been other cases, and no solution.  She’s hardly calmed by Beckett’s assurances, clearly thinking that they’re simply soft platitudes with no meaning.  He rocks to attention when Beckett shoots that down.

“Joanne. Listen to me. You're going to want to play out every possible scenario in the next couple of days. If only you'd been there. If only you'd come by. If only you didn't work late. And I'm telling you, it's not your fault. The ones to blame are the monsters that murdered your mom. This isn't a speech. It's not a platitude. It's a promise. I am going to do everything in my power to make sure that they pay for what they did.”

He hasn’t heard her speak like this since she admitted her brief history.  So much pain, still.  How does she bear it?  Shouldn’t she be relieved of that pain?  He remembers his illicit copy of her file, and makes a mental note to call Clark Murray to see if he’s ready to look at the photos yet.  He doesn’t want to see her unhappy, if he can make it better.  Which he can.  It’ll just take a little time.  ( _I’m sorry, mommy.  I can make it better.)_   He walks her along to the soda machine, manages to slide a comforting hand over her back as she goes: not that it makes the slightest difference to her set shoulders and more firmly set expression.  He missteps as soon as he tries to compliment her on how she’d dealt with Joanne.  He’s given her the impression that he thinks she was insincere, or alternatively that he’s trying to find out more for his own nefarious purposes.  Neither is true, though in the second case that might be wholly inadvertent.

Whichever she believes, Beckett throws his sympathy back in his face, and changes the subject rapidly as they leave, arguing about how he gets such good reviews.  Since when do cops – even Stanford educated cops – read the New York Review of Books?  _He_ doesn’t even read the New York Review of Books, unless it’s reviewing his latest work.

 “Oh, so many layers to the Beckett onion.  However will you peel them all?” Beckett’s being viciously sarcastic.  He’ll deal with that.

“How will I peel them all, Beckett?”  There are no cameras in the elevator. (He checked.  Exceedingly carefully.)  He traces her jaw and down the centre of her neck, runs a swift hard finger down to her waist and slides hands under her shirt and over her back.  “The same way I’ll peel off these layers.   Carefully, and slowly, and with infinite attention to the detail it reveals.”  It had been a rhetorical question.  She only hopes that this is a rhetorical answer.  She doesn’t want her past dragged up, with or without attention to detail.  His fingers are playing over her ribs.  She pulls away and tucks her shirt back in just as the elevator stops.

“Get off, Castle.”  He smiles slowly.  They won’t be in the precinct in a moment, and then there will be considerably fewer restrictions.  None, in fact, except the risk of Beckett saying _No_.  It’s the first time he’s managed to get her away from her desk in days, and he’s not going to let it go to waste without a fight.

“C’mon, Beckett.  Let’s go for a drink.”  Beckett considers.  She’s weary, mentally exhausted, and she’s achieved little today.  She should go home and sleep.  She needs, she thinks, a distraction from the case: she’s given it everything and nothing is helping.  She needs a break from it, and if she goes home alone now, she’ll just keep circling uselessly through hours of insomnia.  The potential for an hour or two’s distraction, however, is standing right beside her.  She’s proved that she’s still firmly, wholly, focused on her duty and her dead.  She has to afford herself a rest, because she’s pushing too hard on nothing.

“Okay.  Where?”

“I know this bar.  It’s quiet, and off the main track.  Needs a bit of smartening up, but the beer’s still good.”

“Lay on, MacDuff.”

“You got it right!  No-one gets it right.”

“Some of us are educated, Castle.  Cops don’t just spring from dragon’s teeth full formed with shield and gun, you know.”

“And now you’re referencing Greek mythology.  That is so _hot_.”  There is, however, far more boyish enthusiasm in his voice than seduction, and he’s grinning like a six-year old at a softball game.  “C’mon, get in the cab.  We can trade quotations – who said it, or where it came from - over a beer.  Bet I win.”

“Bet you don’t.”

A couple of beers later it’s evens.  Beckett’s disallowed quotations in Latin and Greek, and Castle won’t allow her anything in any modern foreign language in return.  English only.  Neither of them have missed one yet.  Beckett’s relaxed into the game, terrifyingly competitive but without the frantic, have-I-missed-something look in her eye that’s been present since they were first called in.  Castle notes it with some relief, and sidles a little closer to her in the booth.  Beckett regards him with some suspicion, but doesn’t say anything.

“Rosy-fingered dawn,” Castle says, with an air of _look-how-clever-I-am._

“Seriously, that’s the best you can do?”  He looks hurt. “Homer’s Odyssey.”

“You must spend your time reading books of quotations.  Huh.  Your turn.”

“The voice of the turtle.”  Castle looks thoroughly happy, and slides a little closer still without Beckett noticing.

“Alice in Wonderland.”  Beckett bounces triumphantly on her seat.

“You lose.  I win.”

“What?  I’m right.”

“No you’re not.  You’re thinking of the Mock Turtle.  You’re wrong and I’ve won.”  She’s smirking so widely her face will split, shortly.

“Don’t believe you.”

“What do I get for winning?  I want a prize.”  She’s just a little buzzed.  “You lost, so you have to get me a prize, Castle.  Don’t worry, a packet of M&M’s will do nicely.  It’s the principle of the thing.”

“You haven’t won.  I’ll prove it.”  He taps out a search on his phone’s browser.  Beckett sits back with her beer and smirks some more.  Castle’s face falls.  “I lost?  How can I have lost?”  He pouts.  “You must have cheated.”

“Nope.  I’m just a better man than you.”  Castle growls low in his chest.

“I don’t think so,” he rasps.  And since there’s no-one to see in the dim light over this dingy, back-of-the-room booth, he kisses her, because he’s wanted to since Sunday morning, when she wasn’t there when she should have been; pulls her into him and holds her there, delicately exploring her mouth till her hands come up round his neck to keep him in place. He eventually lifts off a little, before he takes this to places that even this empty bar might object to.

He can think of a better prize than M&Ms for Beckett.  He smiles slowly.  “Drink up.  It’s time we went home.”  Beckett raises an eyebrow, but before she can object he carries on.  “To get your prize, of course.  I need to find a store before they all close.  I pay my bets on the nail.” 

“ ‘Kay.”

She must be tired, or buzzed.  She hasn’t objected that he’s been kissing her – almost in public – and she’s letting him take her home.  Letting him take care of her.  Though he’s not exactly making it obvious that’s what he’s doing, and he’s also pretty sure that some of the ways he’s intending to take care of her aren’t on the AMA’s approved list.  They will be on the Beckett approved list, though.  Very shortly.  If she thinks that she doesn’t want taken care of, well, he’ll play that game for now.

There’s a 7-Eleven across the street, and Castle ceremoniously purchases a packet of – hang on.  Those aren’t M&Ms.

“Hershey’s Kisses, Castle?”

“Kisses are so much more romantic, Beckett.”  He stops on an evident thought.  “What’s your name?  You haven’t told me your name.”  Beckett smiles with the same infuriating blandness as a cat.

“Not telling you.  That’s my secret.”  She will tell him.  Later.  He’ll persuade her.  He goes back to the main matter.

“Don’t you think Kisses are a better prize?”  She hrrumphs with trademark irritation.  But a triumphant smirk keeps peeking out, however hard she tries to suppress it.  She likes winning. 

“Really, Castle?  Cops don’t do romance.”  He fakes a swoon.

“Beckett, Beckett.  I’m completely heartbroken that you won’t accept my Kisses.  How shall I recover from the tragedy this heartless Ice Queen has wrought?”

“I don’t know, Castle.  How about entering a Trappist monastery?”  He clasps both hands over his heart in a wholly theatrical gesture he must have learned from his mother. 

“You’ve stabbed me through the heart, Detective.  The only hope is for you to accept these Kisses.”  And he presents her with the bag as if it were handmade chocolates from MarieBelle.  Beckett thinks sulkily that he probably buys chocolates from MarieBelle any time he likes.  She treats herself once a month, from there.  Strictly once a month, and she never, ever shares them.

“Thank you” she says with grace.  Her smirk makes it clear that she’s still crowing internally.  She’s so smugly content that she even assents when Castle snags a cab and inserts them both.  In the cab Castle possesses himself of Beckett’s hand without so much as a by-your-leave and occupies the first stage of the journey by drawing soft, seductive patterns on it.  Much to his surprise, and considerable delight, she doesn’t object.

Beckett is, in fact, not really conscious of what Castle’s doing.  She’s run herself ragged chasing shadows for four days, and as the tide of adrenaline that’s buoyed her up ebbs, she’s weary.  She realises, surprised, that she hasn’t been irritated with Castle once since he’d suggested a drink – which is certainly a record, because he irritates her every other minute (except in bed, a hissing voice slithers into her mind) – and that, just like at Po, she’s actually had an enjoyable, amusing time.  And, of course, she won.  Indeed, although she’s physically still a bit tired, her mind is clearer: she’s lost the frantic searching for any small clue, re-visiting every item over and over, even in sleep.  She thinks that sleep tonight might bring refreshment, not reproach.

She wiggles a little to get more comfortable and discovers that in some mysteriously unnoticeable fashion she appears to be wiggling herself into the crook of Castle’s arm.  That was sneaky, she thinks.  When did that arm move?  She ought to be annoyed.  But being annoyed would take more effort than she currently has energy for, and she can’t be bothered to try to summon any energy.  So she simply accepts.

Beckett hasn’t realised – hasn’t let herself realise, just as she always does with anything she doesn’t want to think about, anything that might force her to reassess her solitary life – that since Castle proved useful – _saved your life, Kate_ – her underlying view of him has undergone another shift, to encompass the concept of _partner_ : someone on whom she can rely to have her back.  She can, in fact, trust Castle on and off the job.

Castle is thinking alternately _this is very nice_ and _what the hell_ depending on whether he’s thinking with his body or his brain.  Body is of the view that he should tuck Beckett in more tightly and not let her go.  Brain is pointing out that at some point Beckett will realise that she is snuggling – of her own volition! – and will stop, likely with some violence.  Body says he could prevent that by moving his gently stroking fingers from her hand to her leg.  Brain says _no_ , take it easy, control yourself, accustom her to petting, not just wildly hot sex.  Currently brain and body are in a hard-fought draw.  Brain wins out when they reach her apartment.

Castle pre-empts Beckett’s reach for her wallet and without actually mentioning it manages to be in her block and in her elevator before Beckett remembers that she hadn’t actually asked him up.  Though she probably would have, if she’d thought about it.  Just as a distraction.

“Is this you being a gentleman, Castle, or practising for being a good loser next time?”

“A gentleman.  I won’t lose, so I don’t need to practice being good at it.”  Beckett makes a rude noise.

“So what was that earlier?”

“An aberration.”

“Better get used to … aberrations, then.”  She unlocks her door, turns to peep up at him. “Want a coffee?”  She grins.  “I’ll even share my winnings.”

“Coffee would be great, thanks.”  He follows her inside, and while she heads for her kitchen, he prowls around her apartment, looking for little bits and pieces which will go to make up Nikki – so he tells himself.  He’s really looking for clues and tells, to strip a layer from the Beckett onion, in her words: to get under her skin and learn, own, more of her story, in his.  He hasn’t previously paid any attention to her apartment except to find the bedroom, being far more interested in its occupant.  It’s… eclectic, he decides.  Stuffed bookshelves, mostly murder mysteries with a leavening of classic literature, and a Kindle on the table too.  Unusual pictures, not a style he’s ever seen, of snow, and onion-shaped green and gold domes on blocky buildings. It dawns on him that they must be from Ukraine, or maybe Russia.  But she doesn’t know he knows that.  _Careful, Rick.  Be very careful._   He peers at the delicate watercolours more closely.

“Suzdal,” Beckett’s clear tones ring out behind him, making him jump.

“Suzdal?”

“Town outside Moscow.”  She turns away, picks up and fondles a small white stone bear from its green plinth.  “Jade, supposedly.  I got it at Lake Baikal.”  Castle looks momentarily blank.  “A long way East in Russia.  Next stop is Outer Mongolia.”  Swift memory dances through her eyes.  “I flew from Moscow, six hours, five time zones.  Nearly three thousand miles, and all there is on the ground below are birch trees, all the way.  I landed at night.  The sky was so clear, and the stars were all different, somehow.”

Castle lifts one of the two framed photos beside where the bear had rested, looking at the silhouetted figure.  The question is apparent in the silence.

“Fishermen on the lake.  They catch _omul_ – it’s white fish, very good. I took them at sundown, with the light skimming over the lake in front of me.”  Her voice is softer, fading.  She’s not really talking to him at all, Castle perceives, but floating in memories six thousand miles from here, ten years past.  “It was beautiful: wholly remote and untamed; unbelievably primitive, for a modern country.  Old women still drew water from the lake; carried buckets on a yoke across their shoulders; the houses are wooden with fretwork eaves painted bright colours, just one big room divided by curtains, no running water inside except one cold tap.  It’s forty below, outside, in winter.  I was there in fall, when the trees were golden.”

He could never, would never, have expected this poetic, lyrical description from Beckett.  Suddenly he knows that Nikki will have travelled. And then she puts the bear back on its plinth with a sharp click of stone on stone, the noise breaking her mood.

“And then I moved back to New York and became a cop.”  The weight of the words bends the air around her.  Castle doesn’t say anything for a moment, still staring at the silhouettes, realising that she’s opened up, showed him a little more of who she is.  Another layer.

But she’s closed down again, padded over and drawn her feet up on to her couch, arms wrapped round her knees, two mugs of coffee steaming on the table in front of her.  The mist of memories still shrouds her.  He comes to sit on the couch, not willing to recall her further to cold reality, coddling her between the arm of the furniture and his own large frame, settling an arm behind her.  He’s still caught by this soft, poetic Beckett; as he had been when she’d talked about her history before; and now, even more than he wants to take her to bed (though that is always an attractive option) he wants to hold her, peel her hard gloss shell away and heal the injuries that time has dealt her.

He succumbs to temptation without a struggle and hoists Beckett into his lap.  After an instant’s stiffening, she clearly decides that it’s okay, and relaxes into him.  If it weren’t Beckett, who’s normally slightly less cuddly than a porcupine, he’s call it a snuggle.  It’s odd, he muses.  He’s not normally inclined to snuggling on couches like a pre-teen, either.  Hot sex, now… But right now, Beckett feels very comfortably – and very comfortingly – right, tucked in his embrace.  Maybe some kisses, a little making out, shortly.  Maybe, tonight, a softer form of addiction, though no less permanent, to match this softer Beckett.  He doesn’t even register his own word choices, as he nuzzles her hair, as he strokes gently at her waist, as he cossets her close and hopes that she’ll accept this for a little longer; that she won’t spot that he’s – rather successfully, he preens – taken care of her.

Beckett’s let her mind drift, unconfined, through the memories of Kiev, Ukraine, and Russia, her travels; long ago and far away.  Once upon a time…  The mood she thought she’d closed off has re-descended, and she’s only tangentially aware of Castle next to her, the brief interruption as he arranges her on his lap, the slow heartbeat under her ear forming a backing track to the ebb and flow of the tiny tides in Lake Baikal, or on the shores of the Black Sea, merging into the sound of the waves rippling.  Once upon a time, long ago and far away, before her whole world changed.  She remembers it always being sunny, crisp, clean blue sky in fall, chasing away the harder dusty blue of the scorching, airless summer.  The season had changed in a single day, from summer to fall; she’d woken one morning to a freshness, a bite in the air; the earth altered when she sauntered through the streets and parks of Kiev.

Only short months later the season of her life had changed, as irrevocably as the winter comes.

Then, she’d wished for her father to be there, like this.  He never had been, after that first sharp changed day, and then she had held him above the water, until she had to let go before he drowned them both.  The seasons of his life had turned, too.  But still, when she’d needed warmth in the winter of their grief, there was no room at her father’s hearth.  Jack Daniels had occupied that space, instead.

This warmth is not her father, not there to soothe her grief, just a brief respite before she takes up her load again.  Comfort, solace, closure: these are things she delivers to others, not something she requires for herself.

She straightens up and pulls a little away, the smooth lacquer of her professional shell snapping into place as hard and fast and sharp as the blade of a guillotine.  She looks at Castle, who’s acquired that same oddly assessing expression that he’s only displayed when she’s revealed something _and_ he doesn’t think she’s watching.  She also becomes aware that he’s holding her in that curiously protective way that she’s noticed after sex.  She moves sharply off his lap and speaks in her normal clipped, brisk tones.

“I spent a semester in Kiev, did some travelling that summer.”

And there it is again, Castle thinks, not in the slightest surprised.  The Beckett brush-off:  closeness, feelings, openness; all swept up into the hard vacuum of her self-control, and disposed of.  In a moment, she’ll either throw him out, or start the dance.  He realises, bleakly, that she’s hiding her soul behind the wants of her body.  He should refuse her, but he wants her, and surely if he gives her what she needs she’ll open up?

“Sounds fascinating,” he says, completely sincerely.  Beckett shifts uncomfortably, wanting to move away from her history.  Time for a diversion.

“I don’t think you’d have liked it, Castle.  Not where I was.  You strike me as someone who likes their creature comforts.”  Her smile is delicately malicious, and openly inviting.  Ah.  The dance.  Ah well.  He’ll dance with her, if dancing’s her desire.  He’ll be her dance partner.  The only partner she’ll need, in the dancehall or out of it.

“I’ll admit I like comfort.”  He acquires a lazy, sleepy smile that reminds her irresistibly of a leopard she’d seen in some zoo, long ago.  “You know what?”

“What?”  she replies suspiciously.  She knows there’s a trap lurking.  She can feel it in the undergrowth of the conversation.  She just hasn’t spotted it yet.

“I could do with some comfort now.”  She looks thoroughly sceptical.

“What’s the problem, Castle?  My couch not up to your standards?”

“Not at all.  A different sort of comfort.”

“Uh-huh.  Sure you could.”

“I need comforted.  I’m all upset ‘cause you won.”  He fakes a look of blinding realisation.  “You said you’d share your kisses.”

“Hershey’s, Castle.  Hershey’s.”

“You didn’t specify.”  His face is innocent, but his eyes are dark and intent.  “So I will.”  He pulls her firmly back on to his lap and takes advantage of her outraged splutter to invade her mouth, briefly.

“Mmm.  I feel a little better.  I’m not completely comforted, though.  You need to share another one.”  This time he takes it more slowly, nudges at her lips till she opens to him, balances her, hands at her waist, as she pivots to straddle him and _oh that is right where she ought to be_.  One hand lands at the nape of her neck, the other at the base of her spine, and for now at least she will _stay put_.  He holds her tighter against his chest; dives deeper, harder into her mouth; flexes his hips to grind into her and when she wriggles and makes little sexy noises he is definitely wholly comforted. Not comfortable, though.  Definitely not comfortable.


	28. Take me to the place that you go

This hadn’t been quite the plan.  Admittedly, it hadn’t _not_ been the plan either.  It’s a very effective distraction, from the case, from her weariness and most importantly from her past.  For both of them.  Beckett slides quite deliberately against Castle, feels the powerful, answering thrust of his hips and a sharp flex in the grip of his hands, moves down from his clever, searching mouth to kiss against his thrumming pulse, to nip sharply where his neck meets the hard muscle of his shoulder, to force his groan.  The way he’s got her pinioned, she can’t reach much of anything else.  But.  She’s won once tonight, she intends to win again.  Even if she eventually loses, she’ll still win.  Win-win.   Mmmm.

But she can’t open her score sheet until she can move.  Right now, moving is less than easy.  However.  If in doubt – cheat.  Her hands are free.  His are not.  The placing of his hands leaves him wide open to attack.  She strikes with cobra speed. 

He squeals.  Actually, positively, squeals like a girl.  And squirms, and wriggles, and squeals again.  She reduces him to hopeless breathlessness in short order and before he knows where he is she’s opened his shirt and his belt and is attacking his pants while he’s still trying to capture her hands.  Her victory lasts a whole ten seconds before he rolls to trap her beneath him, recovers enough to try to catch her hands, but she’s too quick, and too clever, and her fingers are _evil_.  When he does catch them he pins them firmly above her head and leans his weight on top of her.

“You cheated,” he growls slowly and direfully.

“Brains are better than brawn, Castle.  I’ve got brains.” 

“You cheated,” he says again, darkly. 

“No, I took advantage of your areas of vulnerability.”  She smirks nastily.  “You’re ticklish.”  He removes one hand from holding her wrists and runs it down to her ribs.  It has absolutely no effect at all.  “And I’m not.”

“Maybe not,” Castle says in a slow, interested sort of way, “but you cheated.  Remember what happened last time you cheated?”  She does.  Oh yes.  Her breath catches, her eyes widen.  Her smug smirk shifts into a slumberous, parted-lipped smile, promising silky delights.

“I didn’t cheat,” she murmurs, allurement soaking each word.  “You’re just claiming I did because you can’t stand losing.”  She runs her tongue over her lips, deliberately.  “What are you going to lose tonight, Castle?”  The air is sultry, the edge of danger, darkness, creeping closer.  Castle’s lost his air of happy good humour, and is gazing down at her with hard-edged intent.

“I’m not going to lose anything.  You are.  You’re going to lose all your clothes, and then all your control.  You’ve had your fun, and now I’m going to have mine.”  She moves restlessly under him.  His voice drops into the deep, dominating velvet baritone that doesn’t bother with her ears but strokes straight between her legs.  “Will you play nice, Beckett?  Or do I need to ensure you can’t cheat again?”  She squirms, but she’s not conceding anything yet.

“Now who’s cheating?” she husks.  “Can’t you manage on your own?”

“Oh, I can.  Just like this.”  He keeps hold of her wrists, slides off to kneel beside the couch, slowly and deliberately strips her to her underwear one-handed, slipping her scarlet top over her head, sliding down her pants.  “That’s better.”  His fingers dance along her ribs, his mouth whispers over her throat and across her neck.  He knows she’s expecting predatory hard possession, but this is his game now and he’ll decide the plays.  Addiction comes in so many different forms.  ( _Just a little taste.  Please.  I need it._ )  He flickers across her so lightly she’s barely aware he’s touching, avoiding any area that’s still clothed.  She whimpers and pulls against his imprisoning hand.

“Uh-uh.”  He kisses delicately across her stomach and follows that by tracing his fingers upward from her knee.  Her anticipation is palpable.  “Let’s take this elsewhere.”  He picks her up in one smooth motion and carries her into her bedroom, spreading her out across the bed and letting the heat in his eyes scorch over her.

“You look unwarrantedly innocent in that cream lingerie, Beckett.  Almost virginal.”  He smiles darkly, and simply the look on his face makes her writhe, stretch out wantonly and flex.  “Wanna play a game?”

 “A game?” and there’s a catch in her voice that has nothing to do with nervousness.  She looks back at him with answering desire; Lorelei on her rock.  “Still _cinnamon,_ ” consenting with that one word to the next step, the next stage; sinking for the third time. 

“We’ll need a silk scarf.  Got one of those?”  but of course she’ll have one, and more, of those; he’s sure of that.

“Just one, Castle?”  She sounds almost disappointed, but she directs him to a drawer from which he selects one of many: soft, heavy cream silk, perfect for the purpose.  He leaves the drawer open.

“You like touch, don’t you, Beckett?”  She hums assent.  “Touch can be so much more fulfilling, if there’s no other sense competing with it.  So much more intense.”  He folds the scarf lengthwise, and sees realisation dawn in her eyes, swiftly followed by the deep green flare of heat.  She reaches out to him, and doesn’t speak.  He blindfolds her gently, snugs the scarf around her head and ensures that the knot won’t… interfere.

Beckett lies still, adjusting to the soft slither of the silk against her face and the lack of sight. She’d expected, wanted, a different game, and it’s taken her by surprise that he isn’t exploring the other reasons for a drawer full of silk scarves.  Not that she’s used them for that, in some while.   Sorenson hadn’t been interested.  She’s worn them, instead, and let the other possibilities fill her edgier dreams.  For a moment nothing happens; and the lack of external sensation sends ripples under her skin as she waits, heat blooming within her, each still, silent second sending anticipation through her bones and muscles, stoking her higher.  She can hear Castle moving around the room, stepping softly so that she has to concentrate to establish where he might be.  He doesn’t speak, the loudest sound her own breathing; and as she waits, sure without being sure how she can know that he’s watching her with hot possession and raw lust, she senses the air shift around her, his bulk settle on to the bed and a finger run softly along the edge of the blindfold.  Without sight, she can’t tell where he might go, can’t foresee his actions.  All she can do is react.  She reaches for him once again, but his hands aren’t where she’s blindly searching, and suddenly his weight has lifted from the bed, but still he doesn’t talk.  The very silence is itself arousing, keeps her focused on the heat in her veins and the prickle of desire along her nerves, here in her voluntary darkness.  And then he does speak, softly, a little distance away: by her dresser, so that she has to strain to hear clearly. 

“I’ll choose where to touch you, where to kiss you.  Time to give in, Beckett.  You know what you want.  You want to let go.  I’ll take you there, just like you want me to.”  There’s a very slight tension to his voice, only noticeable because there are no other distractions.  “Just the way you want me to.”  The air moves again and the faint scent of his cologne drifts past her.  He must be closer, moving as silently as night falling; and then he draws a soft wet line across her mouth, parting her lips with his tongue to claim entry, sure of his welcome.  Too soon he moves away, pauses, the small shifts of his weight giving no clue about where, or how, he might next touch.  This time it’s a firm line from knee to thigh, hard dry fingertips.  She mews softly, opens to give him access, is left waiting for a touch that doesn’t come.  He teases more: blows warm air across her navel, wet strokes at her collarbone and firm fingertips below her knees, leaves her gasping and twisting.  He hasn’t touched a single erogenous zone, and yet she’s damp and hot and becoming frantic as he takes off her bra.  Without sight, perception, without foreshadowing of his actions, she’s left lost in the sensations with no ability to prepare herself.  It’s scandalously erotic, but she wants more.  The next time he touches her she catches him, pulls his hand to where she’d like it, sliding it up over her breast and pushing into his palm.  He doesn’t resist her upward tugging, but carries on upward, switching grip so that he’s caught her wrists.  He places her hands above her head.

“I said I’d take you there; I’d decide where and when to touch you.  Not you.”  She feels the soft touch of silk on her wrists, a twist of fabric figure-eighting round them – that’s smooth, she thinks, and wonders with a midnight thrill what else he might be planning – the gentle tug of the knot.  Firm hold without discomfort.  She hears, through heightened senses, more fabric slithering across itself, and is instantly soaked.  She understands what’s happening, and she wants it.  When he lets go of her wrists, she knows she’s tethered; that her hands are no longer free.  Dark desire pools in the sheen gathering on her collarbone, hardens her nipples further, flushes her cheeks under the silk blindfold.  When Castle touches her she moans.

“Kiss me.”

“When I’m ready.  My way, Beckett.”  He runs his tongue up the inside of her leg and she moans louder, opening wider to him, squirming as he breathes hotly against the wet scrap of cream satin she’s still wearing.  “I said you’d lose.  Your clothes, and your control.  Just the way you like it.”  For the first time, he deliberately glides a finger over her panties and watches her buck and tug against her bonds.  “You like that.  Don’t you?”  She doesn’t answer, panting.  “Answer me, Beckett.  Do you like this?”  And he does it again, a little harder.

“Yes.”  But he’s changed tack, and now he’s palming her breasts, rolling her nipples till she whimpers and moans and arches her back against his hands.  He’s too good at this, and she can’t move freely, and _fuck_ it’s so hot and just the way she wanted it.  She lets go of her mind and lets her body take over.

By the time he returns to slip her panties down her legs she’s emitting formless noises of need, sensation burning through her every place he touches, turning up the ratchet of her desire notch by notch.  He kisses her hungrily, devouring her; forceful and dominating and wholly intent on bringing her to screaming culmination before he slakes his own need; slips down her body, scraping teeth and stubble and leaving sharp nips, tiny bites, small marks of possession where only she will see them; spreads her wide and holds her apart, naked and open to him, wholly unable to deny him anything, for now, wholly and completely _his_.  He draws a delicate wet line at the crease of her thigh.

“Are you mine?”  He draws another one.  This time, she doesn’t hesitate, and the rush of satisfaction leaves him breathless.

“Yes.  Castle.  Don’t tease.”  And a third, nearer. 

“Are you sure?”  She writhes and moans, desperate for the sensation and wholly centred on touch and sound.

“Yes.  Stop _teasing_.”  Yet again he strokes, ever closer, never there.

“Say it.”  He breathes out hoarsely, over her.  “Say it, Beckett.”  He licks delicately again, so close, tastes her and it’s _not enough_ as she twists, held, trapped and blind, at his mercy; so he traces her with his tongue and she almost screams but it _isn’t enough_ and “Say it.  Say it for me,” and this time…

“Yours.  I’m – _ohhh –_ yours.”  And he tongues her more firmly and she screams and shatters as soon as he does.

But that’s not enough for him.  He’d promised to take her to wherever she wanted, to let her let go, and he always, always keeps his promises.  He’s only just begun.

None of which means that he can’t enjoy the dance too.

He slides gently up and unties the blindfold, kisses her closed eyes, unties her hands.  She might like that game, and to tell the truth so does he: Beckett tied to the bed and open to him is a vision he’ll see in every hot hard dream, but he also likes it when her arms come round him, her nails bite into the muscle of his shoulders, his back; he likes her hands in his hair.  He likes knowing that he’s holding her still with only the bulk of his body and the power in his muscles.  He lays an arm over her, slides the other under her neck and leans propped on his elbow, tucking close in to cuddle her until she revives.  He wants to see her, this time, wants her to see him.

Beckett opens her eyes slowly and discovers that Castle’s looking down at her.  She also realises that she’s no longer restrained.  She flexes, stretching and arching sinuously from her shoulders, slightly aching in a way that she’d forgotten that she loved, down through the ripple of her abs and a lift of her hips, all the way to the extension of her ankles and toes.  Castle gulps in a breath at the sight.

“Like what you see, Castle?”  she murmurs invitingly.

“Oh, yes.  Naked and lissom and wet and _all mine_.”  The hot notes of ownership buttress each word.  The arm around her shoulders tugs her closer in, so that he’s pressing against her hip, no possibility that she can doubt his desire for her.  His other hand skims over her, cups her, and she gasps in air in her turn, brought back up to the apex of the arch by only that touch, turns to him and drags his head down to her seeking lips, takes his mouth and flips him on to his back where she can slide over him and place him exactly where she wants.  Exactly where, from the buck of his pelvis, he wants.  She slides down a little further on to him, releases his mouth and nips sharply over his clavicle, soothing the sting with tongue and lips.  And then his hands are on her waist and she doesn’t have control of the pace or the game any more: he’s holding her still and he’s not moving and _fuck_ that is driving her further up because she wants him deeper, filling her full, hard and thick and long and all the way inside her.

“Trying to take charge, Beckett?  We can’t have that.  This isn’t the precinct now.”  She essays a wriggle, but though he inhales sharply his grip on her doesn’t change.  He moves her: a little up, a little down.  Her breathing becomes choppier, harsher.

“Isn’t that interesting, Beckett?”  he rasps.  “You thought you were on top but you’re still on the bottom.”  He sounds rather smug.  He moves her again, a little up, a little further down on the return stroke.  She squirms against him, trying to take him deeper.  “Let go, Beckett.  I’ll give you what you need.  Just let go.”  It’s half a plea, half a command, and it registers on her hindbrain before her conscious mind catches up with it. 

She stops all resistance and simply lets him move her, each glide a little deeper, a little harder; till the rhythm of his breaths changes to match hers and the smooth slides become sloppier; and then he flips them over so she’s under him and he’s wholly inside her and he slides a hand down between them and circles her and oh _this_ is what he wants, Beckett screaming out his name and begging him for more, deeper, harder; under him and around him and only aware of him as he’s only aware of her; neither of them sure where one stops and one begins.  _Together_ , he thinks.  And then there’s nothing but the movement and the moment and release and _her_.

Letting go of her is a bad idea.  It’s always a bad idea, because as soon as he lets go of her she pulls away, whether it’s physically, by leaving, or mentally, by putting up her shutters.  Unfortunately, much as he wants simply to hold her spooned against him and explore her further, it’s late and he has to go home.  But he can be cool about it: as casual as she; he can hide how much he’d rather stay.  She doesn’t want taken care of, she doesn’t want a relationship, she doesn’t care if he stays or not.  _She_ doesn’t stay.

“I have to go.  I have to get home to Alexis.”  He moves away, and the cool air washes over her back.

“ ‘Kay.”  She sits up, perfectly assured in her nakedness, and smiles, watching him dress.  It’s a nice show.  “See you tomorrow.”

“Till tomorrow,” he says calmly, and wishes that she’d sounded more regretful – indeed, regretful at all – that he’s going.

Beckett eases herself out of bed when she hears the outer door close and begins to run a bath, heavy on the salts.  Partly it’s to soothe her muscles: Castle’s a big man, all ways up, and she feels a little stretched; partly it’s to soothe her mind.  She’d revealed too much, and she’s sure he’s spotted it, sure he’ll feed his story from the table of her memories.  More, she realises, she’d taken comfort from his presence, and now he’s gone she wishes he hadn’t; wishes that he’d stayed.  But she wouldn’t have asked, because that’s not what this is about.  She doesn’t need taken care of.  He said that wasn’t what he wanted to do either.  That’s what they’d both agreed.  She’s perfectly happy with that.  Perfectly happy.  She tells herself that all the way through her nice hot bath, which for some unknown reason is much less comforting than usual.

She curls up around the pillow that still smells of Castle’s expensive cologne and tells herself that it’s all organised just as she wants it.  No muss, no fuss, no relationship, no problem.

No chance of getting hurt.

She doesn’t ask herself why she feels she can trust Castle to have her back when the bullets fly; to stop at the most intimate points if she asked; to take her places she’s never trusted any man to take her – and yet she won’t trust him with her given name or her emotions or her story.  Instead she falls fast asleep, only waking to her alarm and a new day.

* * *

 

Castle picks up a cab almost instantly – no shortage of those in Manhattan – and settles into the back seat to think.  He’s not wholly satisfied with the evening.  He’s peeled a layer of skin, sure, but she’d diverted, distracted, danced away.  There’s no point questioning her: she doesn’t answer, she’s not amenable to interrogation.  But then again… She hadn’t fought it: him, or herself, really; not the way she has done.  She’d stepped into the dance almost instantly, given up and given in to him and let him take her everywhere she wanted.  He’s not sure why: maybe tiredness, maybe simply that she wanted to cover the exposure of her soul by exposing her body and forgetting everything in the white rush of release. 

Much later, he lies awake in his own bed; wide and empty, but still, somehow, he’s surrounded by the feeling of her; and ponders the mystery of a woman so very, very comfortable with the dark-smudged aspects of sexuality and so very, very uncomfortable with openness and emotion.


	29. Dig a little deeper

The morning does not bring enlightenment, but at least Beckett’s not as tired and drained any more.  That is to say, she’s only half-exhausted.  And, to her amazement, when she returns from another fruitless canvass the boys have found something.  It’s a thin, thin thread, almost invisible, but it’s the first they’ve had.  A man who specialises in a very particular form of locksmithing.  Lock-picking with a bump key, to be precise.  He’s remarkably confident that they can’t pin anything on him.  His alibi is so fictitious it belongs in one of Castle’s early novels, but his pals will undoubtedly back him up.  He’s so smug he’d give Castle a run for his money, too.  Mind you, he doesn’t think much of Castle. Mary with the Manicure?  That’s a nickname she’ll remember.  She tucks it into the back of her mind to snigger over later.  The boys’ll like it, too.

Sniggering, and any desire so to do, is stopped instants later when the slimeball across the table suggests that Castle’s there because she needs help.  _Needs help_?  _Can’t hack it alone_?  She’ll show this dirtbag who’s in charge.  A microsecond later the table’s in his gut and he’s wheezing as he talks.  Unfortunately the bruises on his stomach don’t incline him to say anything useful.  At this point she’d cheerfully turn him to pulp.  She doesn’t need anyone to help.  She doesn’t need a partner.  She can do this job and solve this case alone, and if it wasn’t for orders she would do.  Still, she can get rid of Writer-Boy and get some time on her own.  She stops at the restroom once she’s out of interrogation and doesn’t return to her desk.  She’s been scraped down the raw edge of far too many comments about _girls on the job_ , far too many references to _too cute to hack it_ (she’d cut her hair even shorter the next day), far too many operations in Vice because she _looked the part_.  She’d made it through the Academy and graduated top without any help at all, hadn’t dared to look for it because it’s far too easy to give the wrong impression and _everybody_ seemed to be looking for evidence of it.   And then there’d been the final straw: the dead child. 

She’d done it all herself, she’s made herself the best detective she can be all by herself, she’s made herself into the woman she now is all alone, and _nobody_ , not this scum, not other cops, and _especially_ not Castle, is going to change that.  She doesn’t need help from outside her professional team, she doesn’t need taken care of, and she doesn’t need anyone to interfere in her life in any way.  Dirtbag, in fact, has just pushed one of her nuclear buttons.  She can’t bear the thought that anyone would think she needs a _civilian_ to help her do cop work.  She can’t bear the thought that anyone would think she needs anyone else anywhere else in her life.

Beckett goes to the range to find peace and quiet and to relieve her towering frustration by shooting hell out as many targets as she can manage for as long as possible.  It’s not helping: she’s not shooting well and every time she misses she gets angrier.  Her shots get wilder as her temper gets hotter.  Not only is she infuriated by the implication that she needs Castle to solve her homicides for her, she hates not being able to do anything at her best, and right now both her investigation and her shooting are conclusively not at their best.  She’s been rocked by the case: the similarities between herself and the victim’s daughter, and that she’d exposed her own feelings to try to console her.  If she’d thought that Castle had been listening that intently, she’d have sent him out before she started.  She doesn’t need his misconceptions nor yet his subsequent sympathy.  He’s got it all: he’s never experienced tragedy or loss like it.  He simply does not understand, and she resents him trying, resents his obvious interest and concern.   She’s _not_ a victim.  Then she’d gone and compounded her own error by telling him about some of her past.  She doesn’t want concern, or intrusions into her history.  And she definitely doesn’t want help.  She was the best detective in the Twelfth before he arrived and she’ll still be the best long after he’s gone.

And joy of joys, Castle turns up at the range.  That’s the problem with these old precincts: the range is in them.   He’s still looking at her with more concern than anything else and that just puts the tin lid on her fury.  Then he tries to psychoanalyse her and if he doesn’t shut up or get out she will be the lead suspect in a homicide case herself.  Instead she tries and fails to kill another target, without any regard for Castle’s ears.  Maybe if he were deafened she could get rid of him.  Even if she can’t make him _go away_ , if she’s shooting she can’t hear him.  She reaches for a new clip, and surprise, surprise he’s talking again.  At least he’s dropped the fake empathy: now he’s just irritating.  And she is certainly irritated.  Not to say furious.  (Deep inside, a little voice is telling her that this is certainly not Castle’s fault.  She’s not listening.)

Castle had originally come down because he’s had an idea about the case and wants to take the jewellery photos home to study them, and perhaps discuss them with one of his less official acquaintances.  As an aside – who’s he kidding? – he’d been a little worried about Beckett’s reaction to Joanne and to his expression of concern, and more worried about how she’d reacted to the perp.  He feels that she’s slipping away from him again: that her walls are thickening; that she’s turned right back on to the on-ramp to the freeway to burnout, and he’s sure he won’t be able to persuade her out of the precinct for an hour today even though she clearly needs to stop and regroup.  Watching her shoot is not relieving his feelings.  He’s sure she must be considerably better than she’s currently displaying.  Then again, her rage is palpable.  He decides on being irritating, because the alternative is to spin her round, pull her in and kiss her hard till she _sees_ him again, till she lets him bring her down; which idea is right now quite likely to get him shot, not necessarily accidentally.  She puts three through the head, and for the first time since he came down looks partially satisfied.  He hopes she isn’t imagining it’s him.

 “Wouldn’t it be more of a challenge if they weren’t standing still?”  Patronising jerk.  What does he know about cop training?

“Okay, Castle, you show me how it’s done.”  She bets he can’t shoot properly.  Why would he need to, anyway?  He lives in Manhattan, not the Wild West.  He might work out, but shooting well is a whole different ball game.  He takes a stance.  Really?  That’s his stance?

“It’s not a duel, Scaramouche.”  Nope, not taught properly.  What does he think this is, some pre-Mayflower English pistols-at-ten-paces affair?  Ugh.  Let’s at least sort his stance out.  If he’s going to pretend to be a cop, he can damn well look the part.  “Here, square off to the target, feet shoulder distance apart.”

He is finding it desperately unhelpful to his concentration to have Beckett touching him.  On the other hand, he knows something she doesn’t… he’s an excellent shot, just in a slightly different context.  But it’s so cute, the way she’s trying to straighten him out, and she’s closer than she’s been all day.  He’d do something about that, if he didn’t have a gun in his hand.  Looking like an idiot for a few minutes is a very small price to pay for having her snug against him, and he’ll have his revenge very shortly.  He expects that she’ll be impressed by his ability, when he gets to the real challenge.  He’s got some ideas for relieving her frustration and evident upset, too.

“Whoa. Shot too soon.”  Maybe he shouldn’t have been thinking about those ideas just then.  Beckett is clearly unimpressed.

“Yeah, well. You know, we could always just cuddle, Castle.”  She inflects her words with as much sarcasm as she can manage through her unadulterated fury.  She knew he wouldn’t be able to shoot straight.  He’s just a writer.  Not a help, or a support, or an anything.  Just a writer who’s good in bed.

And, clearly, keen on smartass remarks.  Shame he can’t hit the target – ouch!  Can’t hit the target but somehow manages to target _her_ with the shell case.  She wipes blood off her face.  Blood.  The perfect accessory for a perfect day with a perfect jerk.  She’s about to tell him to leave when he opens his fat mouth.

“You know, I came down to ask you if I could take home some of those stolen property photos?”

No. _No_.  He is not taking crime photos again.  He’s an observer.  She doesn’t need his help to solve this.  And surprise, surprise, he hasn’t even got a good reason.  No.  And he still can’t shoot.  Though that one, right into the testicles, would incapacitate any man.  Including male bystanders, as they wince in sympathy.  Pretty useless on a female perpetrator, though.  It would miss anything helpful.  Right.  Let’s show him how hopeless he is.

“Tell you what, you put any of the next three in the ten ring and I will give you the files.”  He hasn’t a hope in hell.  The way he’s shot so far, he couldn’t put any of the next three hundred in the ten ring.  She’s perfectly safe.

“Yeah?”  Oh, Beckett.  Walked right into it.  He can’t resist a challenge.  Never could.  Even though he knows that in less than half a minute he will be in more trouble than ever got him thrown out of another school, he can’t resist proving that he’s more than she thinks.  And he can stop her killing him.  Probably.  After all, she’s put her gun down, and she’s finished her clip.

“Yeah.”  _Game on_.  And he squares up and puts all three in the ten ring in less than three seconds.  That’ll show her.  Oh.  Uh-oh.  She’s not happy.  Oh _boy_ , is she not happy.  Death – his own – is reaching for him from her face.  The last time he saw her this angry was… ooh.  Was their first date.  Shame the range has cameras.  Far too many areas that Beckett frequents have cameras.  If he ran the world… he’d lose some of these damn cameras, that’s for sure.  Because she’s so very, very angry right now and all he’d have to do is touch her and she’d explode.  Just like always.  _Damn cameras_.

“You’re a very good teacher,” he smirks, in his best annoying tone.  Except – uh-oh, that was a mistake.  She doesn’t look as if there’s any arousal in this fury.  In fact, there’s an undertow of upset.  Oh shit, this was not a good strategy.  Maybe he can make it better.

She wants to hit him.  If it wasn’t for the cameras, she’d slap his stupid smirking stubbly face into the   middle of next week.  How _dare_ he play her like that?  She spins on her heel to storm off and beat the crap out of the punchbag before she starts beating the crap out of Castle.  She finds herself spun back.

“Hey, look” – he’s trying to talk.  She’s not interested.

“Let go of me.”  She tries to shake him off with a sharp snap of her wrist.  “Let _go_!”  Her voice is rising.  “I don’t need your stupid games.  Take the photos and _get out_.”  She snaps her wrist again and this time it works.  She’s out of his reach in an instant.  He stands there, utterly confused.  Suddenly that cold hard shuttering comes down and closes off all her emotion.  “Take the photos, since you want them so badly, and get out.  I don’t need your _help_.  I can solve this case on my own.”  She turns to leave, then turns back.  “And don’t come down to the range again.  _Civilians_ ” – she could have said _sewer rats_ with less contempt – “have no place here.”

He’s left staring at her stiff-backed stride as she exits.  He has absolutely _no_ idea what happened there.  Okay, so maybe it wasn’t the best plan to blindside her like that, but even for today’s thoroughly bad-tempered Beckett that was unusually vicious.  He sits down on a handy chair and tries to work out what’s going on today.  He’ll have plenty of time.  If Beckett’s left – and he’s sure she has – he’ll need to get a cab backhome.  Okay, back to the beginning.  Being not today, but last night.  She was fine when he left.  At least he thinks she was.  He wonders if she’d wanted him to stay, and dismisses the thought instantly.  Miracles may happen, but Beckett wanting him to stay would qualify as the Angel Gabriel sounding the Last Trump. 

Yeah.  She couldn’t have cared less if he stayed or not.  She couldn’t care less if  _she_ stays or not.  Just like five minutes ago.  And suddenly he’s not confused, he’s angry.  She had no right to behave like that: bitch-slapping him like he’s the bad guy.  People don’t  _do_ that to him.  He’s  _Rick Castle_ , dammit, and he is not some pet to be kicked around.  Whatever her reasons, it’s more effort than he needs or wants to deal with them.  He’ll get the photos and go home.  If Beckett doesn’t want his help, fine.  He’ll just investigate on his own.  See how far he can get.  See how far she’ll get without him, he thinks angrily.  He ignores the undercurrent of his own hurt that she’s pushed him away.  She can have what she wants, then.

He goes back upstairs to the bullpen, where Beckett very obviously _isn’t_ , explains to an interested Ryan that Beckett’s let him take the photos home in case he thinks of something overnight, and is completely _uninterested_ in hearing that Beckett came back in looking ripe for committing some murders of her own, snapped at both Ryan and Esposito for no reason at all, left them with a list of follow-ups all of which are a repeat of what’s already been done and then left, claiming she was going to the morgue.

“Except,” says Ryan, “that Lanie just called for Esposito to tell him something about an older case and Beckett’s not at the morgue.”  He looks brightly at Castle.  “What’cha do to annoy her today?”

“Existed, I think.”  Ryan nods sympathetically. 

“I get you, man.  She’s always like this when a case doesn’t pop.  Not usually nearly so bad, though.”

Castle’s still pretty annoyed with her, but not so irate that he can’t see why this one’s hit Beckett so hard.  Still, if she wants to be nasty, she can do it elsewhere.  He’s not her punchbag, and she can stew in her own angry juice for a while.

He tells himself all the way home that he doesn’t need to deal with tears and tantrums (he had enough of that when Alexis was a toddler, and his mother keeps him in practice).  He’s never needed to.  If some woman starts taking out her temper on him, he just walks away.  Celebutante rows don’t impress him.  He’ll just concentrate on the photos, and the case, and ignore Beckett. 

And so that’s what he does.  For ten minutes.  Then his ill-disciplined mind worries at the playback of the day for a while, till he drags it back to the photos.  For another ten minutes.  Repeat, on continuous loop, for the next two hours.  Which only irritates him further.  He never needs to deal with this crap.  He doesn’t want to deal with this crap.  And he absolutely definitely doesn’t need or want to go and find out what’s actually wrong and make it better.  Absolutely not.

But he keeps on seeing Beckett’s rigid shoulders walking away from him.  He keeps on thinking that more is wrong than he knows.  He keeps on hoping that it wasn’t he who put that cold, hard expression on her face – but he can’t see that it was he who did.    He keeps on thinking that in some way he doesn’t understand this is partly his fault, but he’s sure he hasn’t done anything to cause it.  And he keeps on thinking that he should go and make it better.

 _Walking away, Rick.  Away._   He forces the picture out of his mind and goes back to studying the photos.  His mother is thoroughly impressed with the jewellery (maybe Christmas, he thinks.  He’ll surprise her, just like he had with the rubies he bought her from the Storm advances) and is soon cooing over the photos.  Until it becomes clear that the best person on his extensive list of dubious contacts and persons who exist in the rather more shadowy walks of life is Powell.  Powell, who Castle strongly suspects had an affair with his mother which hadn’t ended well (ugh); Powell, who Castle had used as the basis for a character – and then forced into retirement and (not entirely, or at all, accidentally) away from his mother by thanking him in the dedication.  By name.  His mother didn’t realise that Castle had known that she was unhappy: she just thinks he’d been his public, impulsive self.  Well, no.  Not really.  People shouldn’t upset the people he cares for.  It won’t end well for them.

Still, bygones should be bygones by now.  That had been a few years ago. 

Powell is not, it’s fair to say, spectacularly welcoming.  A swift, painful and entirely unexpected punch to the jaw is proof of that.  But after those accounts are settled, he produces a very good red and they turn to business.  He’s useful, but to be truly helpful, Powell admits, he needs to see the crime scene.  The police seals won’t be a problem, he notes enticingly.  Castle is only too willing to be enticed.  He’s still mad, he’s still hurt, he is for some unimaginable reason feeling slightly as if it’s his fault and he is damn well going to prove to Beckett that he’s a valuable part of the team.  Everyone else thinks so.  Then she’ll be sorry she walked away.  A late night field trip seems like the very thing to improve his mood.  And getting one over on Beckett absolutely has nothing to do with it.  No.  It’s simply a piece of research.  If he finds out anything useful he’ll pass it on.  To Ryan and Esposito.

Powell works his magic on the seals and door and gets them in.  He’s wholly unimpressed by the actions of the thieves: in his day they were ghosts, leaving no trace.  Certainly not leaving brutal murder behind.  No class at all.  Powell’s reminisces are thoroughly interesting, right up until the point someone tries the door.  Castle’s left standing in the middle of the room and Powell, as silently as the ghost he used to be, has faded into thin air, leaving not even a trace of ectoplasm to betray his presence.

Oh, _hell_.  Of course.  Who else would be at a closed, sealed crime scene at almost midnight?  This is awkward.  It’s even more awkward that there’s a gun on him.  Funny how the barrel of a Glock looks so much larger when you’re staring at the open end.  He is very, very relieved when she holsters it.  He was almost certain she isn’t wired enough to shoot first and ask questions later.  Almost.

Beckett hadn’t gone to the morgue.  After she’d left the range, she’d gone back to the bullpen, shut down for the day, and gone home. By the time she got there she was at least as miserable as furious: the lack of progress on the case, the lack of leads, her appalling shooting and being played by Castle all overlaying her real unhappiness: that people think she can’t do it alone.  Viperous voices hiss delicately around her mind: if a lowlife scum can think that in less than two minutes, what are the co-workers around the precinct thinking, or saying?  How many people think that Montgomery let Castle in because she couldn’t hack it?  _After all_ , a poisonous whisper slithers, _you didn’t solve the other case_.  No.  She can’t go there.  She mustn’t go there.  It’s past, and her solve stats show that she’s the best.  She is.  She can solve this case, too.  All she needs is to work a little harder, dig a little deeper, put more effort in.  Her dead demand it.

And it’s not as if she’s got anything else to do. 

She’ll go and look at the scene again, stand in the middle of it and see if it’ll speak to her, tell her something new.  See if there’s anything she missed the first time, or the second, or the third.  Maybe in the peace of the dark night she’ll find something.  She goes down to her car and goes over to the expensive apartment.  Hmm.  Her senses go on full alert and she unholsters her gun.  The seals are broken, and she can hear the soft hum of voices inside. When she tries the handle, it’s unlocked, and there’s sudden silence.  She goes in, gun up, ready to shoot.  If there are bad guys in there, she’s got to be ready, because there’s only her.  She’s on a hair trigger, adrenaline pumping through her, ready for anything.

What the _hell_?  Oh, for Christ’s sake.  What is he doing here?  He has _no right_ to be here, invading her crime scene, contaminating the evidence, and just plain getting in the way.  How did he get in?  Oh, this day just gets better and better with every instant.  She drops her gun, reluctantly.

The ride back to the precinct is very, very uncomfortable.  Beckett is wrapped in an armour coating of glacial fury and Castle, whose own temper is roiling some way close to boiling point courtesy of an entirely unwarranted sting of guilt, is not willing to precipitate the shattering row which he’s absolutely certain is going to explode at some point.  Not yet, anyway.  Later.  Somewhere he can force some truth out of her without an interested audience.

Matters are not much improved back at the Twelfth.  Beckett produces as well-acted a facsimile of her normal level of irritation as Castle has ever seen, but he can still see sheer ire dammed up underneath.  If anything, it only burns harder when he says he wants to talk to their lock-picker – alone.  He’s had an idea.  Everybody wants to be famous, don’t they?  And he needs a villain or two…

The man spills everything he knows about the real murders, just for the possibility that he might be a character in Castle’s next best-seller.  Montgomery’s suitably impressed.  Beckett – is not. Though she says all the right things in front of the boss.

Trouble starts the instant Montgomery’s out the door.


	30. Ev'ry glove that laid him down

“Have you finished yet?”  Beckett’s anger would cut diamond.

“Finished?”

“Finished proving how clever you are.”  It bites.  “We all know you’re clever.  Finished showing off.”  Sharp fangs slash through her words.  “We could have got that without you needing to get involved.  We don’t need your help.  You’re here to _observe_ , not to visit crime scenes without a real cop with you or to start interviewing suspects.  Back off.”  She pauses.  “In fact, go home.  Don’t bother coming back until I call you.  You’ve seen enough of this case.”  She turns her back on him and sits down at her desk, pulling a file towards her.

Castle doesn’t move.   “And if I don’t?  What if I don’t go home?  How’re you gonna make me?  You’ve had a bug up your ass since you interviewed Mitchell and you’re taking it out on me.”  He takes a step towards her.  She doesn’t look round.  He moves round in front of her and perches on the desk.  “You don’t get to use me as a punchbag.  If I’ve screwed up, tell me.  If it’s something else, don’t take it out on me.”  She still doesn’t bother looking up, apparently concentrating on the file. 

“Go home.  I have work to do.  I don’t need your help.”  And Castle’s annoyance boils over.

“Work?  At midnight?  Who are you trying to fool?  You don’t have work to do, you’re just hiding.”  He grabs her chin and forces her head up to look  at him.  “You’re hiding from whatever it is that’s spooked you. You don’t fool me, Beckett.”  And then he hears what she said.  “So that’s it.  Sure, you don’t need help.  Oh no.  You can do it all yourself.  Is that why you’re gonna spend another night here, spinning your wheels?  You’d rather kill yourself than accept help from anyone?” 

Emerald hate flashes in her eyes.  “Solving crimes takes _work_ , Castle.  Not something you’d know anything about.  You don’t have a clue about what it takes so don’t think you can help.  You can’t.  Now get out and stop distracting me.  The dead are important.  Your temper tantrum is not.”

And that just finishes him off.  He loses his temper in a way he hasn’t done in years, not since he caught Meredith in bed with her director.  Even then, he probably hadn’t been this furious.  All control incinerates and all he cares about now is cutting her into the same shreds she’s left him in.

“If the dead were as important to you as you claim you’d accept help from anyone.  You’re just lying to yourself.  You don’t care about the dead, you only care about solving the case on your own.  You’re a hypocrite, Beckett.  You’re just in it for the plaudits and promotion.” 

She moves so fast he doesn’t see it coming till his head rocks back hard on his neck.  “You _dare_ tell me I don’t care?  You _dare_?”  She’s standing over him.  “You have _your_ mother murdered and then tell me I don’t fucking care.  Now _get out_ and don’t come back.”  She’s off the precinct floor so fast he barely registers which way she’s gone.  Not to the elevator, but to the gym.

The pain in his face brings him back to himself.  _Shit_ , that had been stupid, and nasty in a way he tries never to be.  She’d stabbed at him exactly where it would hurt most and he’d fought back just as viciously.  He hadn’t even meant it, he’d just wanted to hurt her as much as she’d hurt him.  He thinks he knows what drives her, and it isn’t personal glory.  _Really mature, Rick.  Both of you._   He flexes his jaw carefully.  It’s just as well she’d hit him open-handed.  If she’d closed her fist she’d be nursing a broken hand, and he’d have a bruise the size of Nebraska.  Both of which might be a little tricky to explain.  He sits in his chair for a few minutes, trying to decide what to do.  Walking away, going home, is not an option.  Sitting here till Beckett comes back down will only give her another opportunity to hide behind her walls and snipe until they start a second round of fighting.  He thinks he sees her: she’s determined to prove she doesn’t need his help and so she’s trying to drive him away.  No.  Not happening, Beckett.  (he doesn’t ask himself why it’s not going to happen.  But he is _not done_ with her.)  Which leaves the third option, going after her.  Shame the body armour is locked away.  He might need it.

When he peers around the doorframe into the dark gym he doesn’t see Beckett at first.  A second, more detailed look, as his eyes adjust to the lack of light, shows him that she’s crumpled into a corner, back to the wall, head down on her knees.  He can’t hear anything, even her breathing.  Even so, he’s almost sure she’s crying.  He pads softly over and sits down beside her.  She flinches away.

“Come to have another go?  Go away.  You were perfectly clear.  Go and find a better cop to follow.”  Definitely on the verge of crying. 

“I came to say sorry.”  Because he _will_ be a better man than he’s just demonstrated.  Even if she behaves like that.

“Really.”  She doesn’t believe him.  “Well, you’ve said it.  You can go home knowing you’ve salved your conscience.  Goodbye.”

 _Goodbye_ doesn’t sound much like _see you tomorrow_ to him.  It sounds a lot like _I never want to see you again._   He wraps an arm round her shoulder, and when she stiffens and tries to shake him off grips tighter.  Her evident desire to make him leave cuts at him.

“I’m sorry, Beckett.  You hit a sore spot so I hit back.”  She doesn’t react.  He has to go further.  “I wasn’t always rich and successful.  I… we… didn’t have anything when I was younger.  Nothing.  So when you imply I don’t know what hard work is… I do.”  He leaves it there.  No point in going further, dragging up the memories of another boarding house in another town, another school, another hand-to-mouth week, another set of temporary friends.

There’s a small relaxation under his hand.  “ ‘M sorry, too, Castle.  I shouldn’t’ve…  I’m sorry.  Just… this case.  Mitchell.”  He hums encouragingly, hoping she’ll continue.  “I don’t need someone to help.  I can do it.”  And suddenly it becomes clear.  Mitchell had accused her of not being competent on her own.

“Who’s doubting you?  What does it matter if some pond scum takes a pot-shot?  Who’s going to believe him?”

“You don’t understand. This is my life.  My reputation’s all I’ve got.  If people” – he hears _other cops_ -  “start thinking I can’t do it without a _civilian_ to help…I can’t have that.” She trails off, stiffens up again.  He can hear her shallow breathing in the dark.  He tightens his arm round her, pulls her into him, trying to give comfort. 

“Has anyone actually said that?  Or even implied it?”  There’s a tiny headshake, barely tangible.   “Let’s cross that bridge if we come to it, then.”  She sighs wearily, softer against him than a moment ago.  “C’mon.  It’s late.  Start again in the morning.”  He stands up and pulls her after him, thinks _the hell with it_ and tugs her right into his arms, kisses the top of her head gently.  “Kiss and make up, Beckett.”

There’s a very slightly soggy snigger.  “That line work for you, Castle?”  He hears the snark with considerable relief.  Seems they’re mended, for now.

“Yes,” he says with theatrical offence, and lifts her chin.  “It does.”  And before she can object further he kisses her slowly and with considerable attention to detail.  “There.  All friends again.”

He drops her off at her block, and tells the cabbie to wait till he sees her go in.  He’s certain she’ll object to that, and sure enough there’s a text within a minute of her apartment light going on.  _I have a gun.  See you later._   He sends back _Till tomorrow_ because he can’t resist, even though it technically already is tomorrow, and falls into his own bed exhausted by the overload of temper and adrenaline.  But they’re friends again.  Or something like that.

Beckett curls down into her own bed feeling less angry than she has done all day. She’s still thoroughly sorry about what she said, but she’s bitten the bullet and apologised – and so did Castle – and it seems that it’s all okay.  All better.  She realises that she didn’t like being at odds with him.  Really didn’t like it.  She drifts into sleep and doesn’t dream at all.

The next day they bring Joanne back in to look at a sketch that Mitchell had produced with the sketch artist.  She’s their last hope.  No-one else has recognised it, and Joanne is no exception.  Another bust.  Until she says, almost as an aside, that her mom only wore jewellery to special events.  And that’s it.  All the victims were rich, the types of people who go to big fundraisers, support charities, do the circuit.  So they start cross-checking.  And checking, and checking.  How can there be so many different charities to be expensively supported?  Finally, one ties up to all known victims.  Beckett takes Castle off to pursue the Metropolitan American Dance Theatre.

It seems he knows the organiser.  Or she knows him, more like, at least by repute.  Which would be quite amusing, if she didn’t then spoil it by outright asking if they’re together. 

“No,” raps Beckett, without even thinking about it.  Castle doesn’t exactly play along, but at least _not yet_ is better than a _Yes_ would have been.  They’re not together.  They’re not…  well, they’re just not.  Whatever not is.  She points the moral rather harder.

“Never, in fact.”

Castle doesn’t like that.  He thought they were…  something.  Whatever something might be.  But when the organiser won’t provide a donor list, citing, essentially, commercial confidentiality – or charitable confidentiality, which Castle would have thought was a contradiction in terms, because he’d always believed that the whole point of these fundraisers was for people to show off how much they gave to the relevant charity, he has an idea.  He claims that he has a meeting at Black Pawn and slips off.

Clearly Castle believes in long meetings (she supposes, business meetings do not figure in Beckett’s list of things to think about, and nor does Black Pawn).  Although how he manages that when he has the attention span of a mayfly with ADHD she doesn’t know.  She’s still thinking about how to get the donor list, but since persuasion hasn’t worked, the only option is a court order.  She starts typing up the form, shushing Ryan as she concentrates.  He really should know not to disturb her.  The forms are stupidly difficult to fill in, not because the contents are difficult – she thinks she knows her name, badge number and precinct by now – but because of the tech.  _So_ last century.  There’s no way to correct mistakes once you’ve tabbed on through.

She’s just about done, bristling with irritation at her screen and the damn form, when Castle bounces back in and tells her – as if she wouldn’t know this – that half the judges in New York are on the public donor list.  She’s surprised that it’s so few.  The rest are probably on the private list that she’s trying to get.  So probably she won’t get it, but she still has to _try_.  Why can’t he just see that and stop being so annoyingly happy?  She snaps at him.  He backs off a little, looking surprised.

“Whoa! Hey, you seem a little stressed.”  No, she’s a _lot_ stressed.  And he’s not helping.  He grins.  It’s not welcomed.  Her temper edges another degree towards boiling.  “Hey,” he says again.  What is this, a hoe-down? And could he stop grinning like a cowboy?  This is not the local barn dance.  “You know what you need?”  She raises a nasty eyebrow.  “A night out on the town.”  Huh?

“You what now?”  What the hell?  A night out on the town?  No.  No, no, no.  She is not being seen on Castle’s arm in public.  No way.  No how.  He’ll claim it’s a date again.  They are not dating.  Not not not.  Not.  Esposito and Ryan are looking at him open-mouthed.  They’ll be even more open-mouthed when she starts howling with frustration that Castle seems to think the precinct is a place to try to pick up dates.  And why is he waving two shiny gold tickets around?  As far as she knows Willy Wonka only exists in fiction.  Though right now she needs chocolate.  Lots and lots and lots of chocolate.  Washed down with lots and lots and lots of coffee cut with even more lots of vodka. 

 She is completely wrong-footed when he discloses that these are two tickets to the next Metropolitan American Dance Theatre fundraiser. They’ll all be there wearing their jewellery, of course.  Oh.  Well.  That’s quite a good plan, really.  Really good, in fact.  She feels a bit happier about that.  She can deal with going out with him for the evening, as long as it’s work.  Definitely not a date.  They’ve never been on a date.  She’s not starting now.  Life is looking up, until he reveals the next bit to her.

“Oh, it’s a black tie event.  That’s not a problem, is it?”  Oh _fuck_.  Tiaras at ten paces.  Oh _fuck._

“No,” she lies.  And knows he knows she does.

Ten minutes later Castle is buzzing round her, as annoying as a wasp and twice as noisy.  “It’s lunchtime, Beckett.  Come on, we’re going to get everyone lunch.  I’ve got the orders here.”  She grumps.  “You need to boost your blood sugar.  You’re cranky again.  It’s my duty to my friends to ensure your blood sugar is high enough that you’re happy.”  He’s not going to let up till she moves, is he?  Aargh.  She stands up, not happy at all.  And that’s nothing to do with her low blood sugar.

She’s even less happy when they get partway down the street.

“So, Beckett.”  His eyes are evil.  “You need a dress for the fundraiser.  That black affair” – he looks momentarily distracted – “just won’t do.  Much as I like it.”  She knows where this is going.  Absolutely _not_.  She tries to forestall him.

“You don’t know my size.  And you’re not buying me a dress.”

“I know you don’t have a black tie dress for this affair.  I could tell from your face.”  He’s looking smug.  “And you only need it because it’s part of the job, so you can think of it as a costume.  Vice cops don’t pay for their costumes, do they?”  And now she can see him imagining her in some of those get-ups, and the heat in his eyes could start fires.  “So I thought I’d get you a suitable costume.”  She opens her mouth to protest.  He talks right over her.

“Anyway, I do know your size.”  His voice drops into the bad-boy purr, a full register lower than normal and vibrating through her nerves, that hasn’t failed to leave her soaked and ready once since she’d met him. 

“I know the size of your lips when I kiss them, when you open under my lips for me to take your mouth with my tongue.  I know the length of your neck when I nip it just behind your ear and make you wriggle and gasp.  I know the size of your breasts in my hands when I stroke you and the exact way your nipples peak against the silk of those _touch-me_ bras you wear.  I know the span of your waist when I put my fingers round you and hold you in.  I know your height when I pull you against me and kiss you, when you’re held in tight and you can feel everything I’m going to do to you and for you and with you later.   I know the width of your hips when I have to pin them to the sheets because you won’t stay still for my mouth and tongue and teeth on you.  I know the length of your legs when they’re wrapped around me.  I know every contour of your body, every inch of your skin.  I know your size when you’re under me and I’m inside you and you’re so close you don’t know where you end and I begin.” 

He’s watching sheer will holding her up.  He’s quite deliberately seducing her, even though it’s the middle of the day and they are supposed to be getting lunch for everyone, determined that she’ll give in to this.  Not that it will matter, because he’s seen a dress that he knows will look absolutely fabulous on her and he’s going out to buy it later on.  And some matching underwear, and he’ll insist she wears it for him and then at the end of the night he’ll remove it all, slowly.

“You are not getting me a dress.  I have plenty dresses.” 

And she does.  It’s just that she hasn’t bought an evening dress for five years, and she’s never been to a fundraiser in her life.  Still, if he doesn’t like her dresses that’s his problem.  She’s a cop, not some fashion plate with a multi-million dollar trust fund or a sugar daddy and a clothing allowance the size of JP Morgan’s balance sheet.  She won’t be beholden, nor will she be made to feel as if she’s in some way inferior, needing to be improved, Pygmalion-style.  And she is _not_ listening to his wicked, wicked words.  He can’t possibly know her size.  And she’s not going to give him another chance to find out.

She goes home early and calls Lanie to help her get ready.

Her dresses are not suitable.  Every dress she looks at has a flaw.  It’s got to be at least cocktail, preferably full length.  The pink affair gets Lanie’s thumbs down instantly.  Too short. And Castle’s seen it.  One’s too shiny, one’s too Showgirls, one she should have given to the thrift shop years ago.  The black one’s boring, the multicoloured one doesn’t suit (why’d she ever buy it?  What had she been _on_ that day?  Crack cocaine?).  They’re all wrong.  Lanie disapproves of all of them, too.  How can Beckett not have a suitable dress?  And she’s got less than an hour and hasn’t done her hair or her make-up and hasn’t got a dress and almost all her jewellery is paste and all the other women will be wearing Oscar de la Renta or Dior or Balenciaga or some other extortionately priced designer effort and dripping with genuine diamonds and _why_ did she agree to this anyway?  This is emphatically not her scene.  She’s going to be utterly humiliated.  It really is Pygmalion transplanted to Manhattan, and she’s the pre-makeover Eliza Doolittle.  She might as well use a broad Bronx accent and be totally in character.

Then the door sounds.  Fabulous.  Just utterly fabulous.  At least Lanie can answer it.  Beckett has strongly rooted objections to answering the front door in a towel.  It tends to give the wrong impression, and correction often offends.  Carrying a gun tends to correct the mistaken offence, though.

Lanie returns carrying a very large box and a very small note on top.  Beckett takes one look at the note – _Bibbity, bobbity, boo_!?  That patronising, condescending, _bastard_!  He’s sent a dress.  She is not having this.  That’s even more humiliating than not having one herself.  She is not wearing – oh.  Oh, oh, _oooohhh_.  Oh yes she is.  She’s never seen a dress like it.  Lanie tactfully vacates her bedroom to allow Beckett to locate appropriate underwear, but when she lays the dress out on the bed so she can stare at it lovingly for a while she finds a smaller, tissue-wrapped package underneath it.  When she undoes that there is a hand-scrawled note on a torn-out sheet from a travelling notepad folded up and tucked in.  _Wear these._ Scarlet silk, a little lace: scorching hot yet tasteful.  Hold ups.  She shouldn’t give him the satisfaction.  She’s got plenty of more than perfectly acceptable underwear of her own.  And yet… ohhh, the dress.  Why not?  The thought of doing as he’s asking trickles heat through her.  She does her hair, smooth curls, very different from her daily norm; her make-up a little more glamorous. 

She dresses slowly, from the skin out, and putting on the clothes he’s bought her; the realisation that they fit perfectly, that he had indeed known her so well that he could choose the size with absolute accuracy, sends shivers down her spine, liquid sensation flowing downward.  She realises why there’s no bra when she looks at the back of the dress.  He’s keen on putting his hand on the small of her back, whenever he thinks he can get away with it.  She shivers, again, thinking of his touch on bare skin.

It’s certainly a better costume than she’d ever gotten to wear in Vice.  For a start, it has a skirt, not an oversize belt.  Though the lacing reminds her irresistibly of some of the more fetishistic tops.  She still has some of them.  They haven’t left the back of her closet since she joined Homicide.  Maybe it’s time they did.

Lanie’s dropped jaw is testament to the incredible dress.  (Beckett doesn’t mention the underwear.  Lanie doesn’t need to know that.  Lanie’s far too nosy about Beckett and Castle without including that sort of information.  After all, only lovers buy you lingerie, and she doesn’t want to explain any of that particular interaction to anyone.  Especially as she can’t explain it to herself.)

He’s sent a car for her.  That’s something she could get used to.  It smoothly deposits her at Castle’s block, where the doorman’s already been briefed and she’s suavely sent up with a look of admiration.  She suspects that if she didn’t have a wrap on he’d have been drooling.  She knows how she looks.  She saw it in the chauffeur’s eyes, too.  Her walk had shifted into a prowl as soon as she put her heels on.

She’s wrong-footed again by Castle’s and his family’s enthusiasm and his mother’s (you must call me Martha, darling, despite the fact that she’s still Detective Beckett.  Or, it seems, darling.  Castle better not try that one.) disappearing to find a necklace that will simply be too, too utterly perfect.  Beckett thinks it’s a gorgeous example of top-notch costume jewellery, and accepts with grace.  Tonight, though, is the first time in ten years that she’s worn a different necklace.  She can’t wear the usual one without provoking questions, and with this one on she feels uncomfortably exposed.  It should have been her own mother lending her jewellery, admiring her dress, telling her to have a good time.  It never will be, though.  Never, ever.

She clamps down on the emotion.  It’s not fair.  Castle’s mother is only trying to be kind.   She’s not responsible for Beckett’s tragedies.  She takes a look at Castle, all dressed up.  Well.  He cleans up nice, too.  Mmmm.  But she can’t see why he should be so upset that she’s told his mother where the function is.


	31. C'mon babe, we're gonna paint the town

He’d known it would fit perfectly.  He just hadn’t understood how perfectly stunning perfect would be.  He abruptly wishes that he’d overridden his family and his own statement and collected her, from hers.  He can’t say hello the way he wants to with his mother and daughter as an interested audience.  Still, there will be some time for _conversation_ in the limo.  Only conversation.  Other forms of interaction will wait till the end of the evening – when they’re alone.

He’s a little surprised that his mother’s lent Beckett her necklace, which he’d certainly not – never would have – asked her to do, but it looks spectacular with the dress.  He just hopes that it doesn’t mark Beckett out as bait.  She certainly doesn’t look like a cop tonight.  She must know it’s real – surely?

He introduces Beckett at the party and realises that he still  - officially, because she hasn’t told him - doesn’t know her first name.  That’s embarrassing, but he covers it up and makes a joke of it to the Mayor, about how cops are so very intent at work that they don’t even use first names – like an old-fashioned English boarding school, he tells Bob, and grins.  Underneath, he makes a mental memo to _persuade_ it out of her.

Beckett is very unimpressed to find that Castle’s been gossiping about her at his poker games.  She does not like that.  Oh, how she does not like that.  When the Mayor (she can’t possibly call him Bob) wanders off to shake some hands that might deposit dollars in his next campaign fund Castle offers her a drink.  She would absolutely love to get utterly, totally wasted and not remember anything about this tomorrow.  Unfortunately, not only is she on duty, but there are photographers and press everywhere.  She declines anything stronger than water, and breathes an invisible sigh of relief when Castle goes up to the bar.  Even better, he’s been buttonholed by a talkative woman who’s keeping him out the way.  Beckett looks around carefully to see if she can spot anyone who might be in on the thefts/murders.  Everyone looks very well groomed and expensive: there’s nobody who’s obviously out of place.

She’s planning a short reconnaissance via the restroom to reset her holster, which is slipping a little, (it always needs a little tightening after an hour or so) when she is approached by a pretty woman who’s clearly been everybody’s best friend, wanted or not, since pre-K.  Beckett’s not sure whether to be pleased or insulted that she obviously thinks that Beckett belongs in this company.  Indecision over that issue turns to outright nausea when the woman informs her, in effect, that she’s won the star prize.  Being Castle, who’s apparently the bored rich woman’s partner of choice.  Now she really needs to find the restroom.  She may just throw up if this carries on.  Sure, he’s spectacular in bed, but she’s not looking for anything more, and she has as much interest in his money and reputation as she does in breeding goldfish.  It explains his smugness, though.  She’s amazed his head fits through the door, with all this nonsensical behaviour inflating it.  She makes a polite answer, using up almost all of her store of good manners in the process, and manages not to refer to Castle in any terms which might betray her general irritation or her knowledge of his other attributes.  Though she might call him Ishmael, tomorrow.  She certainly won’t be referring to him by the other names.

She’s checking in with Ryan and Esposito when Castle tugs her inelegantly (that’s unusual, he doesn’t normally lack for smoothness) on to the dance floor.  Inelegance is replaced almost immediately by considerable sophistication and not a small degree of terpsichorean talent.  Beckett, being well-educated and widely read, is perfectly well aware of the sociological implications of dancing and its relationship to sex.  Intellectually, that is.  She hasn’t previously had occasion to consider what that might mean when she’s in a hot and heavy affair with the man by whom she is currently being pulled on to the dance floor, and who’s provided every stitch she’s presently wearing.  There is an immediately obvious and substantial difference in the activity.  Castle’s large hand, spread over the skin of her back through the laces of this astonishing, alluring dress, doing nothing illicit at all, not even a fingertip beyond decent, is sending liquid heat flowing through her core, pooling between her legs; and she will never read a description of a waltz in a sloppy Regency romance in the same way ever again. 

Pressed against him, concealing his hard arousal from the room, she’s caught up in the memory of his body against her, naked, hot, forceful; leading her not on to a dance floor but down into the dark waters of seductive domination.  She widens her stance an unnoticeable amount and he’s right where she needs him.  Dancing, it seems, really is sex with all your clothes on.  He’d bought these clothes, every thread and bead she’s wearing, and she has no idea why she agreed to wear any of it for him, but the possessive insistence implied in the two word note was just so hot.  She shakes her head to clear it.  Ten seconds of fantasising is ten too many when she’s working.  This is about taking down a killer, not getting it on with your boyfriend… What?  No.  No no no.  Not her boyfriend.  No way.  _Get your mind back on the job, Kate.  That’s why you don’t have boyfriends.  They’re a distraction.  The dead deserve your diligence.  Focus._

She pulls slightly away from Castle, just in time to be dipped.  At first it takes all her focus not simply to melt into the movement, rely on his muscle to bring her back.  But she’s working, and that takes priority over everything.  Then she realises that she’s still bent backwards, the position held for far too long.

“Castle! A little help?”  Her tone is sharp.  Castle’s completely lost his concentration.  What’s going on?  And then he pulls her up, lets her go and goes dashing off the dance floor, leaving her as if he’s ditched her in full view of New York’s society glitterati.  Gee, thanks, Castle.  Way to go.  Just as well she’s unrecognisable like this.  Except – he’s having a low-voiced but exceedingly heated discussion with an older man and the organiser, and he doesn’t look like the happy-go-lucky man he usually appears to be when he’s following her around.  In fact, he looks very like that much more intimidating man who can out-spar her.  Hmm.  Something’s up here.  She goes over to join the party just as everyone dissolves into confusion and crossed wires when Castle accuses the others of committing the murders. 

The older man suddenly nods at the stage, by way of short explanation of why he’s there.  Payback?  Payback for what?  It’s a fundraiser, not a competition.  Oh Lord, thinks Beckett, here we go with the charity auction; everybody measuring up each other by their wallets.  She supposes, if this is what the man means, it makes a change from the usual way that men measure their status: by size. She wonders what piece of over-priced rubbish will be on the block tonight.  She’s sure it won’t be anything she’s interested in.  Her mind starts drifting over the case details.

She comes slamming back to reality when Castle’s mother hits the stage.  Whatever the tat that’s being sold off, Castle’s mother is sufficiently theatrical (even on very brief acquaintance Beckett couldn’t have missed that: she redefines Grande Dame in spades) that this might at least be mildly entertaining.

It’s only a signed copy of Storm Fall.  Well, that’s a bit of a disappointment.  Couldn’t it at least have been a first edition of a classic – oh.  Oh, oh, oh _yes!_   Oh, _wonderful_.  The auction prize is Castle.  A date, with Castle.  She can’t hide her smirk.  And the poor little boy’s _embarrassed_ by it.  This is better than Shark Week.  It’s better than winning the lottery.  It’s just so perfect.  And then a man bids high on him and she can almost feel Castle trying to hide his large frame behind her.

He’ll give her anything she wants, if Beckett will only bid on him and protect him from this disaster.  He is going to kill Powell, and his mother, and the organiser.  He knows a man in the Mob.  He’s being sold off like a Roman slave.  He thinks, appalled, that if this hadn’t been such a high society event his mother would probably have arranged for him to be divested of everything but his boxers and probably oiled and waxed to boot.  He’d thought she’d been _unhappy_ with Powell.  Time’s clearly healed that wound.

Beckett refuses, bluntly.  She’s _enjoying_ his discomfiture.  Scrap that.  His outright horror.  He doesn’t want to go out to dinner with any of these people.  He only wants to go out to dinner with Beckett.  He leans down.

“Aren’t you upset that they’re all bidding for dinner with me?” he whispers desperately.

“No.”  What?  Why isn’t she upset that he’s being forced on a date with someone else?  “I’m sure you’ll have a very nice time.”

“But… but… you and me…”  She looks at him as if he’s run mad.

“What?  We’re not dating.”  She grins very nastily.  “I don’t do threesomes, though.  So don’t even think about it.”  How can she make a joke about this?  Surely she knows they’re exclusive?  She’s _his_.  She said so.  More than once.  That means that she should be upset at his mother’s antics.  But she’s still talking, and not upset at all.

“Don’t worry.  It’s just a date.  It’s not as if you have to follow through.  You won’t be rated on your performance.”  And that sounds perilously close to Beckett not caring at all that he’s going out to dinner with someone else.  At least she seems to realise that he won’t be sleeping with anyone else.  He doesn’t cheat.  He never cheats.  A venomous worm of doubt wriggles into his head.  What if Beckett doesn’t think they’re exclusive?  But no.  Before he came along she wasn’t with anyone, and even now he is here she spends twenty hours a day at work.  She has neither time nor inclination for anyone else.  And it wouldn’t fit who she is.  She’d never cheat on anything, work or play: her integrity blazes.  But he’ll make sure she knows that he doesn’t share.  Later.  Soon.  Very soon.

His mother’s worked it up to seven thousand dollars, and he supposes he should be happy that he’s so desirable, but he’s not.  Two months ago, he would have been, he abruptly realises.  Two months ago, he would have been preening under the spotlight and encouraging the bids, playing the big star and using his playboy reputation to dazzle the audience.  It seems a little … pathetic… now, that he did that; now that he does something that matters.  He looks around, wondering if he could disappear and plead an instant-onset stomach flu.  He’s fairly sure Beckett won’t cover for him, though.  She’s enjoying his discomfort far, far too much.  He’ll deal with that, too, later. Hold on – what’s that?

It turns out that they have their break.  Someone’s boyfriend, taking photos, looking like he’s just one of the hordes of paparazzi, actually photographing all the jewels.  They take him in, and while he’s being processed Beckett takes the opportunity to change (she pets the dress, though.  She’s got plans for that dress.) and return herself to normal.  Everyone looks thoroughly disappointed.  Castle has a look in his eye that tells her that he’d had plans for the dress, too.  Or, more likely, removing the dress.  Too bad, Castle.  The case always comes first.  Her work is her life.  Everything else is transient.

Interrogation breaks the boyfriend in short order: he’s no match for Beckett’s focused edge of violence, her driving need to solve the case, to prove herself.  She proves herself with every day, every clue, every case, every conviction, and never, ever lets up.  It’s terrifying, from the outside.  Castle’s reminded of Esposito’s words: _she’s heading for burnout_.  He can see it coming; should have seen it last night in the gym.  But there’s no time to think that through now: no time for anything except going to get the bad guy. 

And they do.  Beckett’s standing over the perpetrator (that _he’d_ put on the floor) in the very early morning light with her Glock on him looking like every gun nut’s wet dream (and his) and daring the dirtbag to move.  Wow.  All his desires for the way in which the  previous night should have ended leap back up. 

Perp caught, cuffed and hauled off; and that is very thankfully that.  The boys have disappeared with the perpetrator (or any one of a hundred synonyms she might have used) to take him back to the precinct for processing.  Time to go home, dissipate the adrenaline rush.  Except that it seems Castle has a different view of the end of this case, and of how to dissipate adrenaline.  He’s still in the remnants of his tux, leaning on the alleyway wall next to the cruiser.  A bruise is beginning to form under his eye.  It’s surprisingly sexy.  And he’s been useful.  Again.

“I’m coming back with you.  Bring the dress, too.  I want you in it.”  It’s not a request.  None of it is a request.

“It’s already in the trunk.  Wouldn’t have left this dress in the precinct anyway.  Who knows what Esposito might do with temptation right in front of him?”  Castle growls deep in his chest.

“I’m going to come to your apartment, where you can put that dress back on and then we can celebrate finishing the case properly, seeing as we got side-tracked by the bad guys yesterday.”  The growl drops to a deep baritone murmur.  “I liked knowing that you’re wearing clothes I’ve bought for you.  That I’d dressed you from the skin out, even if I wasn’t there.  Now I want to undress you, right back down to your skin, like I should have been able to last night.  Every step we took, every note we danced to, you were driving me wild, and now we’re going to finish what you started on the dance floor.  I’m going to take you, Beckett, just like you wanted me to.  I’m going to make you mine all over again, and you’ll accept that you’re mine, all over again.”  His hand is high on her leg, fingers circling lightly; soft intimation of dark intent.  “Won’t you?”  He leans closer and nips gently at her ear, runs his tongue below it to the nerve that makes her shiver.  “Cold, Beckett?”  His other arm drops around her shoulder, hand resting just above indiscretion.  If she were still wearing the dress, she thinks, the tips of his fingers would be only a fraction above the cups of the bodice.  An inch of movement, and they’d be below it.  She’s not wearing a bra.  The dress couldn’t take one and it’s designed not to need one, and she hasn’t been home.

“If we’d been alone,” Castle breathes into her ear, “I’d have held you tighter, closer.  I’d have kissed you, slipped my hand lower, dipped a finger below those laces and stroked over the dimple in your back, made you press against me harder.  I’d have bent you backwards over my arm just like earlier, but then I’d have kissed downward, traced your neckline with my tongue, made you gasp and moan. You’d be completely dependent on me to hold you right there.”  She doesn’t think he’s necessarily talking about the dip.  She’s already hopelessly wet, caught in the web of his words.  “And then I’d straighten you up, deal with those laces at the back” – he nips at her ear again – “watch the dress pool on the floor at your feet…”  He stops.  It’s too much.  He pulls her against him and kisses her with starved desperation.  “Take us home, Beckett.  Now.”

She’s too wound up by his words – those wicked, wanton words in deep, dusky tones, swirling around her to tie her in – to object or even notice his slip.  It’s just as well it’s early, and there’s little traffic to delay her.  He doesn’t speak another word until they’re inside her door.  He doesn’t need to.  The way he’s looking at her tells her everything about what he wants to do.

“Go and put the dress back on, Beckett.”  It’s quite clearly a command.  She quirks an eyebrow.  “Please.”  That’s not a request, either.  Not in that tone.  A tiny tremor trickles through her vertebrae.  She lays the dress over her arm and shuts her bedroom door behind her.

Castle waits for rather longer than he had expected, or wanted, before the door to her room opens again.  When it does, it’s clear why.  She looks exactly as she had when they’d begun the evening: film-star groomed and glossy; impossibly perfect.  It could be some old movie set: Bogart and Bacall across a crowded room, eyes locked, no-one else in their world.  He extends a hand, suavely.

“Shall we dance, Detective Beckett?”  She doesn’t walk to him, she flows, and puts her elegant hand into his.

“My pleasure, Mr Castle,” and her other hand comes up on to his shoulder and his clasps her waist so that his fingers splay out over the skin of her back, soft under those amazingly provocative laces, and whoever invented the waltz knew _exactly_ what they were doing.  He twirls her round and with every step he leads her closer to the bedroom, pulls her closer into his body, strokes his fingers a little lower, just as he’d promised earlier, and then he dips her over his arm and does exactly as he’d described, holding her balanced easily, until she does, indeed, moan.  When they straighten up he spins her into the bedroom, and while the spin may be smooth his breathing is jagged and his eyes are midnight dark. It takes him every ounce of control he’s ever possessed to undo cleanly the knot that finishes the lacing over Beckett’s back.  (If he rips the dress he’ll never be able to see her in it again.)  The dress slithers down over her slim figure and pools like the blood she so often stands by around her scarlet high heels.  She stands by her neat bed like a model, perfectly poised and confident, only the shallow, rapid rise and fall of her chest betraying her.

He kneels before her, supplicant at her altar, and for all his dominance and control he’s helpless in the face of this goddess.  He hasn’t knelt before a woman in twenty years, but he simply cannot do otherwise here and now.  It takes him a moment to steady his hands, to place the lightest of kisses at the tops of her stockings, to sit back on his heels and watch her catch her halting breath as he slowly rolls each shimmer of silk downwards, unstraps the slim diamante buckles around her ankles, steadies her with one hand to remove each stocking and shoe together.  He’s still as fully dressed as the moment he walked through the door.  The effect of seeing her dressed as he’d requested, envisaged; dressed for him and by him and dressed to kill; has left him speechless.  There are no words.  All there is – is worship.

And so he does, holding her till her knees give and she’s pushed back on the bed, adoring her with his pliant mouth and flickering tongue and flexible lips and careful teeth and then with hard, penetrating fingers, takes her past the edge of her control before she knows it, and while she’s still recovering strips himself and what’s left of a pair of scarlet silk panties from her so that he can rise over her and pin her merely with his mass and take her hard and fast and rough until he shudders and groans and she screams and they fall over the cliff together.

Beckett recovers first.  She lies back, slightly separated from Castle, and tries to recover a few working neurons from the sea of sex in which they’re currently dissolving.  She’s confused, and she doesn’t like the feeling one bit.  Mainly, she’s confused by how she’s reacting.  Not the sex.  She understands _that_ reaction perfectly.  He pushes all the right buttons (and she clearly pushes his) and as long as this stays in bed everything is just _fine_.  Very fine. She’s also not confused by her reactions to his liking for dominance in matters related to sex.  She’s always liked that.  So far, so good.  What does confuse her, though, is her occasional flashes of telling him things about herself, when she doesn’t want to discuss her past with anyone, and the way in which his oversized frame is oddly comforting, when she doesn’t need comfort at all.  (She pushes away the memory of two nights ago.  She’d have been fine if he hadn’t come after her, too.  She would.) She needs to lock her history away.  It’s not relevant.  She isn’t a victim any more.  She doesn’t need taken care of.  She’s remade her life, and it works for her.

She doesn’t think that the only part of her life that works _is_ her work.

So when Castle regards her with sleepy, sensual blue eyes and reaches for her again she doesn’t give him a chance to pull her into that possessive, protective embrace; but slithers down his body and shows him exactly how she can reduce him to a pulsating mass of groaning need, until he shows her exactly how good he can make her body feel.  And when he reluctantly leaves, telling her he’ll be in touch later, she curls down among the sheets and pillows and falls asleep surrounded by the scent of him, and doesn’t ask why that makes her so comfortable.  Again.a


	32. Only logical

By the time Castle’s explained the reason why he’s developing a spectacular black eye to his semi-doting family (Alexis is doting, and admiring.  His mother is not.) and then managed a much-needed shower, shave and several hours of sleep, it’s well past lunchtime on Saturday.  Alexis has left him a neat note clipped to his laptop, telling him that she’s gone to meet Paige and will be back late this evening ( _by curfew, Dad)_.  Curfew.  Yeah.  That would be the one she sets herself.  One day he’ll have a real teen… and he’ll hate it.  He ought to meet this Owen boy Alexis keeps mentioning.  His own history as a teen does not incline him to give Owen the benefit of any doubt at all. 

His mother is looking over a script in his living room.  When he emerges, feeling better except around the eye socket, she fixes him with a penetrating half-glare.

“Good afternoon, kiddo.  I take it you had an interesting evening?”

“It was all going great, till you auctioned me off like beef on the hoof and the bad guy hit me.”

“Ah, relax.  You’ll have a wonderful time.  You’ll like her.  Whoever it was.  She obviously likes you, darling.”  Castle humphs, sulkily.  “Seven thousand dollars’ worth of liking.  It’s worth a smile and some social conversation.  You might even get lucky.”  He splutters into his coffee.  Fortunately his mother takes it as disgust at the suggestion and not that he already did.  With Beckett.  Not some random rich woman looking for a good time.  “The bruise will heal.  If not, I’ll put some concealer on it for you.”  He growls, not impressed.  His mother takes no notice at all.

“And it’s not as if you’re going about with anyone at the moment.  However hard you’re trying with that lovely Detective Beckett.”  Martha cocks her head in the manner of an interested tropical bird, which precisely matches her brightly multi-coloured dress.  Castle splutters again.  “She looked absolutely beautiful last night, didn’t she?  I’m so glad I lent her my necklace.  It suited her dress so well.  She does know how to dress, doesn’t she?  She couldn’t have picked a better gown if she’d been dressed by Dior.”  She pauses for effect. “Far too good for you, kiddo.”

Castle preserves perfect equanimity, especially on the matter of the source of Beckett’s dress. (He’d very carefully instructed the saleswoman to remove the label.  He strongly doubts – however beautiful it was – that Beckett would have put it on if she’d known the provenance.  Or the price.) 

“She did look very nice, Mother.  However, I don’t think she’d appreciate your commentary.  This is not _Fiddler on the Roof_.”  He doesn’t comment on her last sentence, and fortunately his mother doesn’t appear to notice.  It’s Martha’s turn to humph.

“I would never interfere in your life.  After all, I didn’t interfere when you married that conniving redhead, did I?”

“No, Mother.  You didn’t.  I’ll invite Beckett round about brunch tomorrow to return your necklace.  She worked through the night on this one, so I’m sure you’ll not mind if it’s not back today.  Now, can we change the subject from your inordinate interest in forcing me out on a date with a woman I’ve never met before and who clearly has to pay for it?”

“Of course, darling.”

“I really wanted to discuss your last Bergdorf’s bill…”

“Oh, darling, I’d love to, but look at the time!  I have to go.  Got a hot date.”  And she’s gone.  Castle smiles to himself at the effect of that tactic and makes himself a refreshing coffee.  He’s tap-danced past his mother’s interrogation with complete success.

He wouldn’t be half as happy if he could see Martha’s expression as soon as she’s out of his sight.  She’d seen the way her son had looked at Detective Beckett, and she’s far from stupid.  She’s put two and two together and got rather more than four, too.  It’s fairly clear what’s – who’s – bitten Richard’s butt.  Metaphorically.  She smiles very sardonically to herself.  So that’s why he’s developed this sudden interest in police work.  Almost a passion, really.  So to speak.  Though she has to admit that he has been writing very consistently.  What she _hasn’t_ noticed was any clue as to Detective Beckett’s thoughts.  A very unreadable face, Detective Beckett’s.  Hmm.  What had Richard said?  Oh yes, that Detective Beckett would be returning her necklace tomorrow.  She smiles more widely as she contemplates a nice chat between girls.  After all, it’s a mother’s positive duty to size up her son’s potential girlfriends.  Maybe Alexis should be there too.  Mm, yes.  A nice chat.   She’s sure she’ll be able to shoo Richard off for an hour or two.

Back at the loft, Castle’s relief at dodging his mother’s questions has manifested itself in a rapid text to Beckett to suggest that ten-thirty would be a good time to drop by if she wants to return his mother’s necklace – with a P.S. of _What’s your name?  How can I refer to you if I don’t know your name?_ \- a call to Clark Murray to see when he’ll have time to look at the Johanna Beckett file,  and a healthy dose of publishable Nikki.  He doesn’t need to write private Nikki any more.  He’s got the real thing, and it’s far, far better.  He even gets a reply to his text.  Though it’s a glass half-empty variety of reply.

_See you @ 10.30.  You can refer to me as Detective Beckett._

Beckett had woken up some time earlier, showered, and set off for a long, hard run to ease out her muscles and, she hopes, to clear her mind.  She needs to get a grip on herself.  She can feel her control of her life slipping through her fingers.  She’d intended... well, that’s the first problem.  She hadn’t intended.  She had, in fact, intended _not_ to get into it with Castle.  And then she’d intended it to be a one-night stand. 

And suddenly it’s been several times, and okay it’s only in bed and it is just a game but she’s not played the _I’m yours_ game with anyone in the last few years and she doesn’t understand why she’s doing it now.  In fact, she’d stopped playing it in a hell of a hurry when someone had thought it meant more than just a bedtime game and started trying to tell her what to do and who to see.  No.  No way.  She’d trusted them, up till that point, until they’d destroyed her trust.  She’d kicked him to the kerb in seconds flat and any time since (not that that’s been often, and never serious) anyone who might even have thought about trying it has been out the door.  And her ability to trust life in general had been destroyed in an alley.  So why’s she playing it with Castle?  She shoves that aside.  It’s too difficult to answer.  (And she might not like the answer.)

And now she’s telling him bits of her past, when she’s off guard.  But she’s never been off guard before and she doesn’t understand why that’s happening now, either.  And he keeps producing this protective attitude and having him around is stupidly comforting.  Which she really does not understand, at all.  But he said he didn’t want to take care of her.  And she doesn’t want him to.  She can take care of herself.  She has to be able to do it on her own.  There’s no point relying on someone else to help you through your life.  Around and around, stride after stride, the even rhythm of her breathing and her heartbeat and her pace beats in dissonant counterpoint to the chaos of her mind.

Thinking is _not helping_.

She should simply go back to the way she was before Castle walked into her tidy life.  With the addition of spectacular, recreational sex, until it stops.  If she does that, if she stops _getting involved_ , backs away, doesn’t rely on him for anything, everything will be okay.  It’s the rational way to proceed.  Logical.  Sensible.  So why does thinking like that make her feel as if she’s been punched in the chest?  Or... maybe she can just stick here.  Just as they are now.  Okay, so she’s said a few things that she wishes she hadn’t revealed, but nothing serious, really.  Kiev was a long time ago and is simply a _what-I-did-on-my-summer-vacation_ story, and she’s said nothing about her mother that the team doesn’t know.  He doesn’t need to know what Espo or Montgomery know.  He doesn’t want to, either.  And she’d talked a bit about corrupt and lazy cops, but that was just background for his book. (she winces, thinking of the name)  Nothing personal.  So actually, she hasn’t really said anything much at all, about anything.  Nothing that might give anyone (Castle) the impression that she needs help, or support, or comfort.  Nothing that would make anyone interested in her history.  So that’s okay.  Yes.  That’s a better answer.  She can keep it to this level.  Keep him.  This far and no further.

But her chest still hurts.  And she’s very carefully not thinking about the ...episode... in the gym, or after.

When she gets home, tired in mind and body and not completely reassured by her own decisions, despite their obvious good sense, she remembers that she has to return Castle’s mother’s necklace.  Realisation coincides with reading Castle’s text.  It’s a good opportunity to draw a line.  He doesn’t need to know her name.  She’s quite happy to be Beckett.  It preserves a certain distance; stops this getting complicated; means it isn’t going to be a relationship.  _Boundaries, Kate.  That’s what this needs._

She spends the rest of the day in the precinct, even though she’s not on shift, frenetically working,  hiding from herself and her unproductive thoughts in the paperwork and old cases.

* * *

 

When Castle wakes he remembers that Beckett’s coming round at brunch and starts to plan a campaign to peel another layer of her story out of her.

His plans for the day go awry at approximately the moment he opens the door to usher Beckett inside.  Both his daughter and his mother react with enormous enthusiasm, which he had not expected (mild liking, yes, overwhelming enthusiasm, no) and which he certainly does not welcome.  They are entirely too delighted to see Beckett.  In fact, they swarm around her like sharks around blood and within five seconds it’s very clear that he is not required.  He remains impervious to all his mother’s hints to leave, because it’s not at all clear that Beckett is happy about the family ambush.  She’s pulled the shutters down behind her eyes and her first action is to give his mother back her necklace with soft-voiced, formal thanks. 

“Darling, it was just perfect.  Nothing accessorises like real rubies, when you’re wearing a dress like that.”  Uh-oh.  Beckett’s just gone poker stiff.  She hadn’t known.  And she is very, very uncomfortable about it.  And, it seems, everything else.  She’s reluctant (not obviously, but he knows her tells) to sit down, to stay; as if she has somewhere else that she should be.  He suspects that she intends to go straight to the precinct as soon as she can get out of here.

His mother and daughter want to know absolutely everything about Beckett’s view of the fundraiser.  People, dresses, music, dancing – they get particularly excitable when she says that she danced with him – and of course his mother’s auctioneer role.  She answers all his family’s questions without ever shifting out of a cool, amused, sociable tone, and if he didn’t know her so well already he’d almost think she was enjoying the conversation. 

Except she’s not. 

It’s quite clear to him that she is not enjoying it in the slightest.  She’s declined food, and the coffee in front of her is untouched.  Her shoulders are tight, and her back very straight.  The hand that’s not in view of his family is white-knuckled, and he strongly suspects her nails are digging into her palm.  Not a jot of this tension is evident in her voice, or her face.  He hasn’t the slightest idea why she’s so tense.  His family are a little… well, enthusiastic is probably a good word for them, if a little understated, but they _like_ her, he realises.  So they’re trying very hard to show it, and to draw her into their ambit.

And Beckett doesn’t like that at all.  Which should be okay, because he doesn’t want a deep, permanent, Sunday-lunch-with-all-the-family relationship, just a longer term affair.  But it isn’t okay.  It’s not okay at all that Beckett isn’t comfortable with his family.  He wants her to like them back, to be comfortable here.  If they’re all friends, it’ll be another tie to bind her to him.  But right now all the possibilities that any of that might happen are dissipating under the force of his family’s collective personality.

Beckett is very deeply uncomfortable indeed.  She had been unhappy about Castle’s mother lending her a necklace, beautiful and appropriate as it was.  She’d not been entirely convinced about coming here, but she’d had to return the necklace – even if it’s only paste it’s precious to his mother -  and she’d at least expected that his family would be out the way.  But it wasn’t paste.  It was probably a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of real gemstones, lent as if it were paste.  She can’t deal with that.  And she’s undergoing a grilling of which Torquemada would have been proud, and all of it is conducted in tones which strongly suggest that she’s being audited for the role of girlfriend.  No.  Not happening.  Audits or girlfriend status.

It’s profoundly embarrassing to be ever-so-unsubtly asked your intentions.  She has none.  Enjoy it while it lasts, deal with the ending when it comes, move on.  None of which includes being best friends with your – your what?  Boyfriend?  Hardly.  Lover?  Only in the most restrictive imaginable sense of the word.  Partner?  As good a word as any.  At least it’s partly correct – your partner’s, then, family.  She’s never met Esposito’s family, or Ryan’s, or even Lanie’s, though she’s heard snippets about each of them in passing.  She doesn’t want an emotional connection with them, because one day she might be knocking on their door to deliver bad news.  It’s hard enough to do that when you don’t know the people whose lives you’re destroying.  She’s sure Castle’s family are wonderful company, full of life and interesting stories, but she doesn’t want to get involved.  She’s not part of their world.

She doesn’t need a replacement family.  Her own will do just fine.  She’s come to terms with her dad’s weakness when she needed him most, her mother’s death.  They worked through it, with time. 

“Mother, I think you’ve interrogated Beckett for long enough.”  Castle can see the day disappearing rapidly down the drain, along with his patience and certainly Beckett’s.  If she isn’t already running for the exit, it’s not far off.  “Why don’t you leave her to have a peaceful cup of coffee.”  _With me.  Not, however wonderful you and Alexis might normally be, with you as well.  Your presence is not required._

“Oh, Detective Beckett, I’m sorry.  We just wanted to know what you thought of the evening.  Richard would never be able to tell us anything sensible.”  Martha smirks.  “Especially once he was auctioned off.  Tell me, Detective Beckett, how much did he offer you to bid on him?”

“Not enough,” Beckett responds smartly, with an answering smirk and a thick layer of non-committal reserve underneath.  Castle grimaces at both of them.  He’s been left with a particularly unpleasant and unwanted dinner date because Beckett wouldn’t play nice and bid on him.  And she laughed at him when he objected.  Worse, she didn’t even care that he was going to dinner with someone else.  Worst of all, he can’t get out of it, because it all has to support his charming, playboy, public persona and Paula will be furious if he welches.  Not that he cares: he pays her, not vice versa; but he can do without the hassle.   He’ll need to be pleasant, and friendly, and not let a hint of boredom show.  Whoever it is will expect flirting and fun, and he no longer wants to flirt and be fun with every pretty, or not-so-pretty, plastic woman who can afford to bid big at a charity auction.  It may be a good cause, but it’s a very shallow outcome.

It would be better, too, if Beckett wasn’t giving a clear impression that no sum he might have provided would have been enough for her to bid.  Putting his family off the scent they’re only too interested in pursuing is one thing, and probably a very good plan.  Implying that she couldn’t care less that he’s going out with other women is not.  Time to switch gear.

“Beckett, would you like some fresh coffee?”  Beckett looks unusually unsure, and there’s a sharply unhappy flick of her eyes at his family.  The tension in her shoulders has not lessened in any way at all.  He thinks that she’s one short minute from politely leaving, alone, and he still has no idea why she’s so tightly strung.  He’s rapidly revising the way in which the remains of the morning might go.  Beckett’s overpowering tension needs dealt with, without letting her realise that he’s easing her into letting him _take care_ of her again, at least for now.  Now she’s taken the first step down that attractive path, he thinks confidently, subsequent steps will be easier.  She’ll show him the next layer of her tough-skinned onion; and another part of her story will fall into place.

“Alexis, weren’t you going to a study group?”  He’d thought she was going to see that Owen boy, though she calls it a study group.   Surely even his distressingly thick-skinned mother might take the hint, and leave too?  He gives her a meaningful glare as Alexis looks at her watch and exits, squeaking and flustered that she’ll be late, and for once his mother does what he wants. 

“Bye, Detective Beckett.  Richard.  Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”  Castle winces at the salacious tone and smile.  Anything more likely to kill any fragment of sensual mood that might, astonishingly, have survived the previous hour than that comment is hard to imagine.  However, she has left.  Beckett’s shoulders slump slightly.  He’d describe it as relief, rather than anything more pleasant.  Still.  He moves up close behind her and crosses his arms over her, wrapping her in where she sits on the bar stool.  Sharp discomfort is radiating from her as she sits stiffly within his grasp.  He lets go, very quickly.

“Do you want more coffee?”  Beckett seems to wake up and realise that she’s not being cross-questioned any more.  “We don’t have to sit out here.  We can go into my office, if you’d prefer.”   _Translation: we can have some privacy._  

When there’s no immediate answer, he concocts two fresh mugfuls of strong coffee, ushering Beckett through to the office and installing her in a plump, soft-cushioned chair not too far from his desk so that he can perch on its edge and watch her, hoping that she’ll start to relax from this unwarranted tension.


	33. Not a public enquiry

“They liked you.”  She’s buried her nose in her coffee and is drinking it faster than a dehydrated camel at a Saharan oasis.

“That’s nice.  I’m glad.  I liked them, too.  It was very kind of your mother to lend me her necklace.” It’s very polite.  It’s exactly what a well-brought up woman would say, no matter the circumstances.  He very clearly hears _I would never have accepted if I had known it was real._

“But they’re a bit overwhelming, when you’re not used to them,” Castle says ruefully, trying to draw Beckett out of her reserve.  “They tend to be a little enthusiastic when they want to get to know someone.”

“That’s a bit of an understatement.  We could use your mother in Interrogation.  Maybe she’d like to apply for a badge?”  Ouch.  Despite Beckett’s pleasant smile and amused tone, that comment had _very_ sharp edges.  Beckett has clearly seen right through his mother.  Castle had been perfectly, painfully aware of what had been going on.  He’d merely hoped that Beckett hadn’t.  _Thanks, Mother._   He changes tack.  At least, he would, if Beckett hadn’t forestalled him.

“Thanks for the coffee, Castle.  Gotta go.”  She stands up.  Well, that didn’t take long.  Even if he’d expected it since the moment his family had opened up the questioning.

“Already?”

“It’s nearly lunchtime, Castle.  Things to do, people to see, you know how it is.”  She’s aiming for the study door. 

“That’s a shame.  I was going to offer you lunch.  I’m an exceptionally good cook.”  He smiles proudly.  Beckett thinks that this is another good opportunity to set some boundaries.  She really had not appreciated the inquisition she’d been put through, and if his family is thinking that they should be vetting her then both they and Castle have another think coming.

“Sorry, I can’t stay.  It’s very sweet of you to offer, though.  Thank you.”  She’s fairly sure that she hears an unhappy growl as she turns rapidly to the door.  Hmm.  Definitely time for some boundaries.  “I’ll call you when the next body drops.” 

An..nd – she’s gone.  He didn’t even get a chance to kiss her before she was the other side of the study door.  Castle is left thoroughly irritated with his mother.  If she’d just backed off, he’s sure he’d have convinced Beckett to stay a little longer.  She’d still looked tired, and a good lunch wouldn’t have done any harm.  But she’s gone, and he knows nothing more about her, and he hasn’t had an opportunity to take care of her, without her noticing, either.  Oh, and he’s effectively been given the brush off from the precinct till there’s a new case.  Three strikes, and he’s out.  It does _not_ improve his mood.

He sits down and tries to write.  In reality, he’s thinking.  He’s thinking just enough about Nikki to pretend he’s working, and indeed every so often he taps out a few sentences.  Mostly, however, he’s thinking about why Beckett was so tense, and why she was so bluntly telling him not to show up till there’s a body.  He doesn’t get anywhere at all.  He really does not understand why, after every time they’ve enjoyed shatteringly good sex, she backs off, or runs away, or hides.  She does it after she’s inadvertently told him something about herself, too.  It’s very odd.  Surely she should be getting closer by now?  More than physically closer.  Physically she’s very close.  But it’s _not enough_.

His phone rings.  It’s Clark. 

“Clark.  What kept you?”

“Rick.  What do you want?”

“Can I bring you over the file I told you about?”

“Rick, it’s a Sunday afternoon.  I was going to go to the park, relax, maybe get a coffee and sit out.”

“We can sit out.  I’ll even buy the coffee.  Just lemme bring you the file.”

Dr Murray sighs heavily.  Seems like this variety of Rick’s enthusiasm has really caught his butterfly mind.  If he ever targeted his intelligence and focused on one goal, he’d be frighteningly effective.  Instead, most of the time he’s amusing, as he bounces like a pinball from bumper to bumper.  However, what harm can it do to indulge his friend?  Especially as it makes for some really good reading, eventually.  “Okay.  I’ll meet you at the Kerbs Boathouse, around three.”

“Thanks, Clark.”  There.  Progress.  He’ll find out more, and tell her, and she’ll be happy, and impressed, and open up.  Meanwhile, thanks to his mother, he now needs to find a way to make Beckett comfortable coming here.  He doubts that she’ll accept an invitation in the near future, in case she has to meet his family again.  At least… if she’s the only invitee.  Ah-ha.  What if he invites everyone, before a new body drops?  Let’s see now… yes.  A poker game.  He knows Montgomery plays: he’s a part of the regular gang now.  Ryan and Esposito play, some, they’ve mentioned it very occasionally.  Beckett?  He doesn’t know.  Another thing he doesn’t know about her.  But he _does_ know, from Ryan, that Beckett can shoot pool.  (It’s so nice to talk to Ryan.  He’s so informative.  And so naïve about Castle’s reasons for talking to him.  Then again, Castle hasn’t ever mentioned any reason apart from research for the book to him.)  So if poker doesn’t work, and he can’t get her here, a night in a bar with the boys and Lanie shooting pool might at least give him half a chance of going home with her, even if it’s to hers.

She might have told him she’ll see him when the next body drops, but that’s not her decision to make.  He’ll go to the precinct tomorrow, and sound everybody out. And in addition to that, he has another idea.  It’s a little devious, perhaps, but… Nikki needs a back story; a history, and that history needs to be realistic.  He needs to know, therefore, how cops become cops, and more; how, and why, they become Homicide cops.  He needs to know about the Academy, and about being a uniformed cop; what areas a cop might work in, how a cop might be selected – if they are selected – to join Homicide – or do they apply?  And if they apply, are they still in uniform, or are they automatically a detective?  He doesn’t think so, but he really does not know.  He needs to know, so that if he wants to refer to Nikki’s history, he gets it right.  He would hate it to be wrong, because there are plenty of readers out there who will pick it up and – quite rightly, but still painfully – criticise him for it, on fan forums or by writing to Black Pawn.  Much better to get it right in the first place.  Of course, getting it right means grilling a real cop, who does real Homicide detecting.  Otherwise known as Beckett.

Per Montgomery’s orders, Beckett is supposed to let him shadow her and answer any – and all – questions about cop matters that he might have.  As long as he disguises his questions as relating to facts, she’ll give away huge chapters of her history even without saying anything personal.  Yes.  That will work.  And she’ll need to tell him it all here, where he can take notes and add them to his storyboard – ah.  Better make sure the correct file is up on the storyboard.  Wouldn’t want to spoil the surprise.  He’ll just do that now, since the other file isn’t making any progress, and won’t, until Clark gives him some answers.  Right.  He swiftly adjusts the electronics.  That’s done.

Back to the immediate thought.  Notes, answers, history; here in his study.  Yes.  And of course it will need to be after hours, since Beckett has a full-time job – not to mention all the extra hours she adds to it.  She won’t – and wouldn’t want to – answer all his questions during shift.  Which is just as well, because he doesn’t want her to be answering them in the precinct, or indeed in working hours at all.  If she’s here, and if he adds a glass of wine or two, she might relax a little: enough to give some information, even if it’s only the tone of her voice or the expression on her face or her body language.  And there might even be the opportunity for other forms of discourse.   Mmmm.  This idea just gets better and better.

So  Poker, and research.  Yes.  Perfect.

He wanders off to meet Dr Murray, whistling cheerfully and completely tunelessly as he goes.

* * *

 

Beckett has gone home to deal with her normal Sunday pursuit: her laundry pile, which is more than usually immense as a result of the hours she’s put in on this latest case.  She looks at it disgruntledly and starts to sort it out.  Unfortunately, that leaves a considerable amount of available headspace into which other thoughts can readily clamber.  Another good reason to hate housework.  It takes far too much time (any time at all, in fact, would be too much) but it doesn’t occupy the brain.  She considers, again, getting a cleaning service, but she doesn’t want someone she doesn’t know in her apartment, so she’ll just have to put up with doing it herself.

While she tosses clothes into the appropriate piles, her thoughts keep wheeling around the whole uncomfortable morning, which leads her on to the whole uncomfortable situation with Castle.  She reluctantly admits to herself – _very_ reluctantly – that he isn’t quite as much of an irritant in the precinct any more.  More of an amusement.  Like having a St Bernard around, really: overly large, overly friendly, and very occasionally really, really useful.  Though she does wonder about the difference between Castle in the precinct and Castle out of the precinct.  Which one’s real?

It doesn’t matter, she decides.  The best way to deal with this morning’s situation is to ensure it doesn’t happen again.  There’s no reason to be sociable with his family beyond civil necessity, and no reason to go to Castle’s loft without a case-related reason, such as picking him up.  Theory can be confined to the precinct, or the phone.  She has a wholly adequate apartment, should private space be required.  Another perfectly sensible boundary. 

She throws her first lot of laundry in and settles down with a cup of coffee and a good book.  It almost stops the nagging voice, whispering in her ear, that she’s kidding herself; that she went past the boundaries she’s trying to establish the first time she admitted she was his.  Because however hard she’s ignoring it, she really ought to know that it meant a lot more to both of them than just a dominance game in bed.

* * *

 

Beckett swings into the precinct early on Monday looking forward to a quiet day in which she can clear up some more of the ever-present paperwork and be ready when the next case drops.  It won’t be long: it never is in New York.  She makes herself a cup of proper coffee from Castle’s machine without even flinching and starts the clear-up of the screeds of paper still left in her in-tray despite her Saturday activities.  An hour or so later, the boys roll in for the start of shift.

“Yo, Beckett.”  Esposito looks her over, grinning widely.  “Bit casual today, ain’tcha?”

“Huh?”  Beckett drags her head, and mind, out the file.

“Bit under-dressed.  Where’s the glam, the glitz?  Don’t you wanna dress up for us?”  Oh God, here they go.  She should have known she’d never get away with that dress without being ragged up and down the bullpen.

“Nah.”  It’s wholly bored.  It doesn’t stop anything, now Espo’s on a roll.

“So we get to look at pants and button-downs, an’ Writer-Boy gets to look down your” -

“Finish that sentence, Espo, and you’ll never speak another.”

“No fair, Beckett.  We deserve to look at some glamour too.”

“Told you, Espo, you stretched the last one. And Ryan’s too short and too thin to suit it.  But” – she smiles just as toothily as Esposito – “if you wanna get some glamour, I hear they’re hiring down at Lucky Cheng’s drag club on 1st Avenue.  I’ll even make an appointment for you both.  As a couple.”  Espo growls.  Ryan splutters.  And at that moment Montgomery emerges from his office.

“Beckett.  Good morning.  Hear you made a big impression Friday night.  You and Castle looked quite the society couple, the Mayor told me.”  He grins innocently.  Beckett winces.  “How’s his research going?”

“I don’t know, sir.  I haven’t asked.”  Her voice conveys _and I don’t want to know_.  Which is when an offensively perky voice pipes up behind her.

“It’s going quite well.”  Phew, thinks Beckett.  Soon, all this disruption will be over.  She ignores the slight twinge in her chest.  “But there’s a lot I still need to know.”  She similarly ignores the small wash of relief.

Montgomery smiles chummily at Castle, and directs a meaningful stare at Beckett.  “I’m sure Detective Beckett will be happy to tell you anything you want to know.  Won’t you, Detective?”

“Yes,” she has no option but to mutter.  She’s _almost_ certain that Montgomery is not looking any more significantly at Castle than usual.

“Just make sure that your research doesn’t interfere with Detective Beckett’s work.”  Which Beckett thinks sounds really, really good; until she parses the potential meanings of the sentence properly.  Then she realises that it’s a double-edged sword, balanced right against her throat.  If Castle’s not to interfere with her work, then she doesn’t have to answer his stupid questions all day.  Though he’ll still be on her tail all the time.  But... if she doesn’t answer them in the daytime, then she’ll have to answer them later.  After work.  She mutters darkly to herself, and curses Montgomery for ever starting this whole shadowing business.  Then she glares at him.  He merely smiles back cheerily, and departs.

When she turns to glare at Castle, on whom her glare has half a chance of working, he’s over with the boys.  His back is radiating smug satisfaction.  His voice is discussing poker, and is also radiating smug satisfaction.  Beckett crams down the childish impulse to throw something at his head.  It sounds as if the three men are discussing a poker game at Castle’s loft.  The boys are unsurprisingly enthusiastic.  When Castle oozes through Montgomery’s door it’s evident from the tone of the chatter that Montgomery is enthusiastic too.  Castle re-emerges with a happy smile and aims for his chair.  Beckett mistrusts both smile and aim immediately.

“Roy” – Roy?  Since when have they been on first-name terms? – “tells me you’ve played a bit of poker too.  Enough to know the ropes.”  Beckett preserves a wholly cool expression.  Inside, she’s dying to laugh.  Montgomery is clearly playing Castle.  He knows perfectly well that Beckett can shuffle and deal.

“Some,” she says.  Yeah.  She’s played some poker.  She’d funded her college bar bill shooting pool and her – considerably larger – textbook account, and half her trip to Kiev, on the card table.  Not a scrap of that extremely interesting history shows on her face.  “Why?”

“Well.  I wanted to give you all a treat.  A thank you for following you all around.  So I thought – since I knew everyone but you played poker – that you could all come over, eat my food, drink my beer, play a few hands and have a good time.  As long as you played too.”  He looks hopeful.  “Everyone else is in.  Are you?”

“When?”  Castle shuffles a little.

“Tonight?  Alexis is out at a study group, so it’s a good opportunity.”

Beckett considers.  She has nothing to do tonight apart from paperwork unless a new body drops.  It’s a team invitation, so it doesn’t breach her boundaries.  And the thought of taking a large amount of money off the boys and Castle and indeed Montgomery, whose motives she currently severely distrusts, is quite appealing.  There’s a pair of Ferragamos she’s seen on Fifth Avenue…

“Okay.” 

“If you can’t make it then we’ll – what?”

“Okay.  What time?”

“Eight or so.  Gives me time to re-stock the liquor cabinet.”  Beckett raises an eyebrow, inquiringly.

“What?  My mother drinks my liquor all the time.  She and her stage door friends.  So I have to check before you all get here.”

Espo and Ryan wander over.  “Is it on?”  They look at Beckett as if she’s their mom and they’re asking permission to go to a party.  She sighs.

“Yes, boys.  We can all go to the circus tonight.”   

“I’ll be the ringmaster,” Castle grins.  Beckett looks him up and down critically.       

“Actually, I was thinking that you were the clown.”  He winces.  Ryan wades in to defend Castle.

“Nah.  Castle’s not the clown.”  He smiles at Ryan’s words. “He’s the show pony.”  The smile is wiped instantly.

* * *

 

The day proceeds without a new murder or indeed anything interesting at all.  Castle doesn’t hang around, for a wonder, and after an hour or so Esposito gets bored of hassling Beckett about Friday night.  Mainly because she’d dialled all but the final digit of Lucky Cheng’s on speaker with the volume up full.  Ryan, having more sense than Esposito – or simply being less brave – has been very quiet on the subject.  At least where Beckett might hear anything.

Ryan and Esposito, however, have their own views on Friday night’s events, and a quiet day with no murders and atrociously tedious paperwork is generally the perfect time to disappear for a proper lunch break and discuss important matters of bullpen significance.  Or, more accurately translated, gossip.

“So, Espo.  Whaddya think of Friday, then?”  Ryan looks mischievous.  Esposito grins back, evilly.

“Made a pretty pair, didn’t they?”

“Yeah, really pretty.”  Ryan sniggers.  “Perfectly matched.  Didya see them dancing?”  Espo nods.

“So you’ve noticed too.”

“Hard to miss, Espo.  ‘Specially for hot-shot detectives like us.  Last time I saw that sort of look it was on a Rottweiler outside a butcher’s window.  Dunno about her, though.  Beckett plays it far too close to the vest to read.”

“I’ll bet you they get it on.  Fifty.”

“No bet.  It’s gonna happen.  Sweepstake.  I call – another three, four weeks from now.”

“I call two weeks.  He looks at her like she’s dinner an’ he’s starving.”

“Think Lanie might wanna join in?”

“Lanie?”  Espo’s dubious.  “Lanie’s got an inside track.  She’s Beckett’s friend.  Girls talk, don’t they?”

“Beckett?  Talk?  An’ I wouldn’t let either of them hear you callin’ them girls, if you wanna live.  C’mon, Espo.  We need a bigger pool than your cheapskate wallet.”  Esposito shrugs.

“Why not?  But no-one else.  Don’t want Beckett hearing about it.  I like living.  Suits me.”

Ryan nods emphatically.  Living suits him, too.

When they’re seated with their lunches, though, Esposito gets a more serious look.

“Ryan, d’you know _why_ Castle’s been let into the precinct?”

“Nah.  I figured he leant on the brass.  Politics.”  He looks as if he wants to spit.

“I don’t see Montgomery putting up with that if he didn’t have a reason.  He’s gotta have a reason for letting Writer-Boy hang around Beckett.” 

Ryan thinks for a moment or two.  Put like that, it is odd.  Montgomery likes their solve rate, and anything that bothers Beckett is likely to affect it.  Castle certainly bothers Beckett: that’s clear, but… their solve rate hasn’t dropped any.  Fact is, it might even be better.  Even with the way-out theories included.  Anyway.  Castle is – well, fun to have around.  And useful.

“He sure does irritate her, though.”

“Yeah.  Suppose it gives her something other than murder to think about.”  Esposito checks for an instant, and swallows the thought of the Castle he’d seen in the bar, that he’d given the file to.  “She needs to get her head outta homicide sometime or she’ll crash and burn.”

They think in tandem and silence for another few moments.  Nothing else comes to them. 

“Nope.  No other ideas.  You could ask the Captain.”

“Or you can.  I said I like living.”

And, with no further ideas, lunch is over and the paperwork awaits.  But now they’ve got a new interest – their bet.  They’ll be watching a lot more closely, now there’s money on it.  But very discreetly.  Beckett is not forgiving if she thinks that her life is being speculated upon.  Not that there has previously been anything to speculate about.

But now there is.


	34. Aces high

Beckett is not a little amused to see Ryan and Esposito’s reactions to Castle’s loft.  She’s a lot less amused to note that Montgomery is clearly very familiar with it.  So that’s how he’s got to be _Roy_.  She’s distinctly _un_ amused (she’s not scared of Martha’s interrogation techniques.  No.  Absolutely not at all.) to find that Castle’s mother is making up the party.  Maybe she can hide behind Ryan or Esposito.  Maybe there’s safety in numbers.  She manages to sit well away from her, anyway, without being in any way rude, and as a consequence starts to enjoy the evening.

She enjoys it much more as she starts to win.  Montgomery is sporting a Cheshire Cat smile, despite his losses, but Castle is looking rather as if he’s working out that he’s been pranked.  The boys are flirting with Castle’s mother, which has the happy advantages of keeping her amused and keeping Beckett out of the line of interrogative fire.  As Beckett keeps winning, a certain air of tension develops around the table.  Matters, and chips, flow back and forward, but net-net Beckett’s still some way ahead, with Castle clearly second.  It all comes down to the last hand, as Esposito calls time on the night.

Martha folds early.  Beckett would really rather not know that Martha prefers strip poker, and she would certainly vastly prefer that Martha wasn’t winking at her while discussing its advantages.  Martha’s clearly on her side.  That’s worrying.  She hadn’t wanted to be audited for the role of girlfriend.  She’s even less happy that she appears to have passed.  She doesn’t want to get involved, but it seems that involvement is stalking her.  Especially as out the corner of her eye she can see Ryan and Esposito exchanging meaningful glances.  Beckett doesn’t think that those glances are related to the _boys’_ partnership, somehow. 

Beckett’s been dealt a good hand, and decides to play large.  After a little to-and-froing, the other cops drop out too.  Beckett smiles in a _have-you-got-the-balls_ way and Castle takes the bait.  Esposito moves the game along.  Castle taps his hand and grins slyly.

“What's the matter? You're not afraid of a little action, are you?”  His smirk could be read a number of ways.  The interested audience appear to be interpreting it to mean cash betting.  Beckett thinks it means something else entirely.  It’s as well she isn’t here on her own.  Strip poker might be the least of her worries, if she were.  Though on the basis of the evening so far, she’d still be fully clothed.

“All in.”  She’s not afraid of anything.  She shoves the entire pile of her chips into the centre of the table and looks challengingly at Castle, who looks back thoughtfully.  The boys and Montgomery whoop and holler. 

Castle looks at Beckett, looks at his hand, looks at the chips on the table.  He’s certain he’s won, if he wants it.  He always likes winning.  But right now he has to decide what he wants to win more.  A lot of money from Beckett; which would be satisfying because she’s been beating him all evening and he doesn’t like losing, but carries the risk that she might not feel like staying around after the others leave; or fold, let her win and indulge her terrifyingly competitive instincts, and leave her in a good mood for later … activities.  He looks back up at Beckett.  He hasn’t got the slightest inkling of her hand.  Clearly, by shoving in all her chips, she thinks it’s a winning hand – or she’s bluffing really, really well – and he simply cannot tell which.  That’s actually very worrying.  If he can’t read her now, is he reading her correctly at any time?  He parks that thought for later, and makes a snap decision.  He folds.  He would _almost_ certainly have won the hand, and the pot, but he’d rather win the Detective.

She’s ridiculously triumphant, and everyone follows her lead.  No doubt he’ll be _Loser_ for a week, or until something new takes their fancy, just like everyone else gets ragged.  But then Beckett’s phone rings and they’ve got a new body, and everyone snaps into work mode.

On the way to the crime scene, Castle fends off Beckett’s commentary on his card playing, liberally bespattered with references to losing, with one half of his brain and frets about his earlier realisation with the other.  He’s been proceeding on the basis that he can read Beckett’s tone and body language pretty accurately, whether she’s realised that or not and whether she wants him to or not.  Coming up hard against a situation where that was emphatically not the case makes him wonder if he’s been bluffed at other times.  It’s unnerving.  He’s sure she’s not able to conceal or mislead him about her reactions when she’s under his hands and mouth and body.  He’s suddenly very much less sure about other occasions.   Like whenever she’s not.

“What was your winning hand, Beckett?”

“Winning, Castle.  That’s all that matters.”  She’s smirking.

“You were bluffing, weren’t you?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know.  Not telling you.”  Still smirking.  “What does it matter, anyway?”

“I want to know.”

“I want doesn’t get,”  Beckett flips back smartly.

“I’ll remember that, Beckett.”  His tone has changed suddenly.  “Turnabout’s fair play, after all.”  It’s possibly just as well that they turn up at the crime scene – a shabby, sleazy rent-by-the-hour hotel – at that point.  Beckett doesn’t necessarily want to explore that statement.  Well, not anywhere other than in private.  Certainly not now.  There’s a corpse demanding her attention, and with Lanie as the attending ME she’d better focus, because Lanie will give her enough to get started whether the body’s on the slab or in a Dumpster. 

Or, it turns out, in a bath full of motor oil with a dent in the back of its head.  Ugh.  She gets all the weird ones, but this is definitely up there in the really nasty category.  Midnight at the motel, with motor oil.  Just as long as no-one starts making sick jokes about lube.  Black humour is one thing.  Necrophilia is quite another.  Eurgh.

Interviewing the desk clerk, who’s a rather bored type until Beckett exerts some force of personality and starts extracting some answers from him, is a pretty pointless exercise.  If your trade is composed of New York’s seedier nightlife, then your definition of strange is… well, skewed.  He’s not really any help at all.  The guests won’t be: they likely rent the rooms by the hour, and they won’t want to be found afterwards, judging by the one who’s just walked by. (she must introduce Esposito to him, he’s big, blonde, in a dress and looks like he’s the lead act for a really down market drag show, with a side order of street walking)

Okay.  It’s close to 1 a.m., and it’s time to go home.  The body’s been removed, there’s nothing more to learn here, and until Lanie can tell her a bit more there’s not much further to go.  She could go to the precinct and set up her board, but she could do that just as well after some sleep.  She swithers indecisively.

“I’ll drop you off, Castle.  Time to leave it for tonight.”

Castle looks sidelong at Beckett.  He’s not wholly sure he believes her. 

“You wouldn’t be planning on starting on the case without me, would you?”  Beckett looks resigned.  She had thought about it.  But now she’s been caught out.  If she does go to the precinct, Castle will follow her there.

“I am going home for some sleep.”  She pauses.  “And to dream about everything I might buy with my winnings.”

He flicks a glance around.  They’ve made it outside the seedy hotel, and the area is deserted, and much more importantly extremely dark.  He puts a hand on Beckett’s back to steer her away from the building and back to her car, and takes the opportunity to stroke gently, down into the dimple at the base of her spine, where it makes her shudder.

“I could help you sleep,” he murmurs seductively in her ear.  His words whisper over her neck.  His hand slips round to pull her into the curve of his arm while no-one’s there to see.  He needs to touch her.  He hasn’t really touched her since Saturday – Sunday didn’t count - and he misses it.  (Her.  He misses her.)  When she doesn’t instantly curl in, he tugs a little harder, exerts just a little more force, and doesn’t miss her slight intake of breath nor her accession to his action.  “That’s better.”  He draws insinuating small patterns on her hip, just hard enough to be felt through her clothes.  Some… persuasion… seems indicated.

They’re almost to the car, and once they’re in it the window of opportunity for persuasion of any kind other than verbal will shut.  Action is clearly indicated.  Castle stops moving, which given the location of his hand perforce requires Beckett to stop too, somewhat inelegantly; swings round to face her and dips his head to claim her mouth firmly.  More accession. And access.  He holds her tightly against him and savours her; tasting as if she were a fine Bordeaux; one hand slipping upward to tangle in her hair, the other gliding downward over her ass to press her hard in where he can move against her in just the right way to make her wriggle in reply.  When she pulls her mouth away her breathing is ragged and her body lax.  Castle loosens his grip marginally.

“You’d sleep better if I came back with you and kissed you goodnight,” he husks. 

“How are you proposing to do that?  I said I’d drop you at yours.”

“It would be much nicer if you didn’t.”  He insinuates a hand under her jacket and flirts it round her ribs.

“And then what?”  He smiles slowly, and even in the dim streetlights it’s unbearably sexy.

“Let’s see.”  It drips slow, sensual suggestion.  She couldn’t deny that it’s an attractive option.  A very attractive way, in fact, to end the evening on a better note than the vision of corpses drowned in motor oil.  She doesn’t need to dream of the smooth black surface, oozing over the half-sunken face; right now she can’t even scrub it from the inside of her eyelids.  And behind this corpse are so many others, right back to the very beginning.  A kiss or two would help that, she thinks.  Leave her with some different dreams.

Still, she shrugs, as if she’s indifferent, unwilling to capitulate so easily, so obviously, to his wants.

“You think, Castle?”

“I don’t _think_ , Beckett.”  He pulls her back in, grinds against her and listens to her soft moan as her stance opens.  “I _know_.”  He kisses her demandingly, taking and possessing as he chooses and claiming the noises from her mouth as she makes them.  “Let’s go home, Beckett.” 

She doesn’t make an issue of his word choice, though she doesn’t, this time, miss it.  Time enough to deal with that later, though dealt with it will have to be.  The dark car park of a trashy hotel at 1 a.m. is not the place: not when desire is thrumming through her veins and heat flowing into her nerves; not when she so badly needs _not_ to see the drowned dead; the previous dead; the first death that set her on this path.  She turns away and unlocks the car and by her lack of any objection gives consent.

The journey back is conducted in charged quiet.  Even in the dark cabin of the cruiser, Castle doesn’t dare touch Beckett: partly to avoid the ever-watchful cameras; partly because if he does touch her, he might not stop.  He’s uncomfortably aroused, and kisses have not satisfied him in the slightest.

His pent-up frustration, anger that his plans for Sunday were forestalled by matters beyond his control (being his mother), and not a small contribution of left-over annoyance from that very unsatisfactory conversation with Beckett where she didn’t seem to care at all that he would be taking some other woman out to dinner and only made unkind jokes about not liking threesomes (and how does she even _know_ that?  That is _not_ a helpful thought); all boil over at the point Beckett unlocks and opens her door, turns round and seems only to expect, if not precisely a peck on the cheek, a grown-up version of kisses and goodnight.  That’s not all that he wants, though if it’s all that Beckett wants he’ll have to deal with it.  He shoves both of them inside, elbows the door shut again, and uses it as a Beckett-rest so that he can press into her and have both hands free to show her what he wants.  What she might, he hopes, want.  He plunders her mouth, his tongue invading to demand her surrender; his fingers slide up under her polo neck, only a fraction away from simply ripping it off over her head.  She doesn’t stop him: she answers in kind, caught up in the desperation of the moment and her need to be distracted from the swollen face of the corpse.  The fastenings of her pants take barely longer to undo than it had taken to slide under her top ** _._**

He can’t bear not to touch her, have her, here and now; fast and rough, wholly possessive; _his_.  He ceases ravaging her mouth, moves to her neck, nips sharply on her earlobe; enough to draw a gasp and wriggle, for her hands to flex sharply on his shoulders and pull him closer.  He moulds her breasts and she presses into him, popping his buttons free, shoving his shirt clear of his shoulders and matching his frenetic stripping of her clothes and control.  He’s too inflamed to have any control: he just has to be inside her, _now_ , and Beckett doesn’t seem inclined to slow down either.

“Make me forget, Castle.”  He checks at that, just for the slightest instant.  Beckett rocked by a corpse?  And then she rolls against him and his pants are open and her dangerous, questing fingers are stroking along him and releasing him and he’s found her wet and open and oh-so-ready and _now Castle_ he slams into her and _oh fuck_ she wants him he can feel it as she tightens hard round him and everything is her and him and nothing else and he slides his fingers over her and it’s all over that fast.

They’re still leaning on the door.  Or, possibly, leaning on each other, with the door making up for the weakness in their respective knees.  They’re both still mostly dressed, too.  They stagger to the couch and collapse into it.  Castle settles Beckett comfortably against him where he can play gently with a wisp of her hair, stroke her shoulder, and try to work out that astonishing admission: _make me forget_.  Unconsciously he cuddles her closer.  What’s she trying to forget? The gruesome corpse of tonight’s variety of New York homicide?  Or… something else?  _She’s heading for burnout_.  It trickles through his mind in Esposito’s harsh accent.  Does it matter what she’s trying to forget, if she needs to forget? As long as it’s not him, of course.  She’s not to forget him.  Yes, it does matter.  Another tiny piece of her story, another tile for his complex mosaic.  But a slim, icy needle pierces him as he muses.  What if she’s just using him to forget?  What if it’s not he who makes it better for her, but anyone would do?  He’s not recently been used to insecurity about women.  Writing… that’s another matter, but women do not normally provoke him to insecurity.  He doesn’t realise that he’s clutching Beckett tighter with every unhappy thought until she speaks.

“Castle, I need to breathe.  Loosen up, or let go and find a stress ball.”

“Don’t want to let go,” he says deliberately childishly, grinning, and makes her laugh.  But he loosens his arms some, enough that she can breathe.

“Better.”  She glances at her watch and winces at the time.  “I need to sleep.   You’ll want to go home.  Lanie’ll expect me at nine to see the corpse.”  Castle doesn’t want to go home yet.  He’ll get home for breakfast, because that’s non-negotiable if he hasn’t told Alexis he won’t be there.  He tries never to disappoint her, because she’s the only thing that’s kept him whole.

Beckett heaves herself up from the couch and her rather comfortable position wrapped up in Castle’s arms.  The dead are locked away again, for the moment, but she’s not at all confident that they’ll stay in their coffins and out of her dreams once she’s alone again.  She won’t ask for company, though.  That’s far, far too close to asking for a relationship, or asking for help, and that’s not what she does.  She’ll do it herself, if she must.  She can face down the dead herself, if she has to.  It’s just that tonight she really doesn’t want to do it alone, with the smeared, swollen body still painted on the inside of her eyes.

“I’ll stay, if you promise not to kill me in your sleep.”  As soon as he says it he’s terrified he’s crossed another line, that she’ll start to shut him down, shut him out.  But she needs him to help her forget, she _asked_ him to make her forget, and if she lets him stay then his need to start to take care of her might be assuaged, for a while.  Long enough, perhaps, for him to work out how he can do so on a regular basis without Beckett noticing.  If _he_ doesn’t take some steps to move this forward, _she_ certainly won’t.  He does want it to move forward.  He wants to know that she’s in this for more than a succession of one night stands, for more than a short affair.  But in the ten days since he’d first thought about that, he hasn’t had the slightest indication that she’s moved her position on at all.

Huh?  It sounds like half a joke, but the front of that sentence is at least as much a question as a decision.  She hasn’t asked him to stay, but it sounds like he’s offering.  So if she’s not asking, then she’s not doing anything that could be construed as her wanting to be taken care of, and she’s not showing that she needs, or is asking for, any help.  So it would stay firmly within the boundaries she’s set.  And thoroughly content with that piece of convoluted, self-deceptive reasoning, which has the happy result of getting her what she wants but wouldn’t request, a large, warm Castle about to be in her bed and keeping the cold corpses away, she smiles.

“Can’t promise.  Who knows what dreams may come?  But I won’t do it deliberately.”  She’s turned away before she can see his glazed look.  He’d never expected that she’d say yes.  But she has and he is _definitely_ not stupid enough to backtrack now.

She looks cuter, younger, when her face is bare, though the silky sleep tee and shorts don’t incline him to rest.  Still, he’s not a callow youth any more, and he recognises the importance of Beckett needing to be rested before she sees Lanie.  He grits his teeth, and washes up in cold water, hoping that it will assist him.

It doesn’t.  Sliding into Beckett’s bed clad only in boxers and with the smooth material of her nightwear slithering against him as he tugs her firmly into his chest (he is going to enjoy every minute of this second occasion to keep her close, and this time he is going to hold on to her and ensure she stays put) does absolutely nothing for Castle’s overactive imagination and overheating fantasies.  He notes with some displeasure that Beckett seems to have been able to fall asleep with no trouble at all, and thinks darkly that, were it not for the sure and certain knowledge that if he gets between her and her work he will be sitting on the kerb with a sore, shoe-printed ass faster than he can blink, he would spend some time ensuring that when he woke her she’d find herself as aroused and frustrated as he is now, and then he’d keep her that way till tomorrow – tonight.  He closes his eyes, and tries not to think about that.

He wakes occasionally, disoriented by the unfamiliar room, finds Beckett next to him and sleeps again, content.  When morning slinks into the room, though, she’s missing again.  He untangles himself from the covers – it looks like a pack of gophers had been building tunnels with them, and he’s sure it isn’t his fault, he generally sleeps quite tidily – dresses, and emerges to investigate, already disappointed in the day.  He’d wanted to wake with her in his arms.  He doesn’t ask himself why.  He doesn’t need to know why.  He’d wanted it, because that’s what happens in a longer-term affair.  That’s all.  So being this disappointed is a perfectly natural reaction.  Even if it’s never happened before.  It’s only because he hasn’t had a long-term affair since college.

He carefully doesn’t think that he had never been this disappointed if any other woman with whom he might happen to be was missing when he woke, either.


	35. Go hard at each other

Beckett is sitting at her table with a cup of strong coffee, a spare mug for Castle, and the remains of the contents of the cafetiere beside her, enveloped in a heavy, satiny robe and lost in thought.  Mostly, and certainly intentionally, she’s thinking about the case.  Occasionally, she’s thinking about why she had let Castle stay, though every time that starts to intrude on her mind she tucks it back in a box marked _Later_.

She’s been working out her plan for the day and the case for the last half hour, since she’d woken, the early side of six a.m.; unwilling to start her morning routine until Castle’s gone.  She likes to have a space for clearing her head in the morning, time to plan her day; time to remember why she wears the watch, the ring; time to focus on the quick and the dead.  So when Castle appears from her room her first thought is not appreciation of his physical qualities but something rather closer to _oh good now I can get on with the day_.  It’s probably as well he can’t read her mind.

On the other hand, when he slides up behind her, crosses his arms across her to hug her in and drops a kiss on top of her head – and then releases her, doesn’t push, recognises that she’s likely in work mode; she feels a whole lot better about it.  Setting some boundaries is clearly working out well.  She turns round to him, offers him the cafetiere and the mug, and is more than a little surprised when he declines.  His expression’s changed, too.  He’d looked a little pensive when she’d turned round: but now she’s offered him coffee he’s looking... well, smug.

“No coffee?”  Castle grins happily.  Even if she’d got up, which he didn’t appreciate, the offer of coffee is a whole lot further forward than the last time he stayed, when she’d practically shoved him  out the door and made it clear, to boot, that she’d not cared if he was there or not.  More importantly and _much_ more hopefully, she looks surprised that he isn’t going to stay long enough for coffee.  His mood improves dramatically.

“No.  I want to get home to Alexis, and I want a shower and shave and clean clothes before I get to the morgue.”  He smiles a sleepy, heavy-lidded smile, far too sensual to be allowed outside the bedroom.  It distracts her from her previous thoughts quite effectively.  “Unless you want Lanie to start asking questions.”

Beckett shakes her head firmly.  The last thing she wants or needs is Lanie asking questions.  Largely because she still has no idea what any of the answers might be.

“Okay.  See you there?”  He still looks ridiculously – and annoyingly – self-satisfied.

Beckett stands up.  Peace to prepare for the day, yes.  But that doesn’t mean she can’t treat that smile the way it deserves and, not coincidentally, leave him just a tad discomfited first.  He’s just a little too sure of himself, this morning, since she offered coffee.  She slinks over to him, slings her arms around his neck and pulls his head down firmly.  It’s _her_ turn to possess, to own.  She kisses him and then strokes over his excellent ass with the firm intent of leaving him ruffled all day.  His response is instant, his hands driving under the robe and her tee and suddenly everything catches fire and she may have left him disturbed but _oh_ if he doesn’t stop doing that she’ll be hopelessly undone and _oh don’t stop doing that_ as his hand dips under the shorts.  She fights back by unzipping his pants and employing wicked fingers to stroke over hard weight but _fuck_ his fingers are inside her and she brings a leg up around him and _this is insane what are they doing_ he’s brought her right to the edge and picks her up to throw her back on the bed and somehow they’re both stark naked and he’s back inside her and _ohhh_.

That wasn’t supposed to happen.  That was absolutely not supposed to happen.  She was going to tease him a little, leave him hot and bothered, and then he was supposed to go home and she’d see him at the morgue.  It was _not_ supposed to turn into uncontrollable, scorching sex.  Not without her planning it, anyway. 

That was _not_ supposed to happen.  She’d teased him and he’d _meant_ just to tease her a little back to leave her hot and bothered through the day and suddenly he’d – _they’d_ – lost control and instead of going home and then to the morgue he’d ended up kissing hell out her and then it had all hit flashpoint and then they were back in her bed and she was _his_.  He brings her into his body and holds her close and _oh this_ is how he should wake up every morning.

Morning.  Oh _shit_ !  He should be home.  He sits up in a hurry.  “I have to go.  Right now.  I’ll be late.  Alexis will worry.”  But he still takes time to lean over and kiss Beckett hard until she’s definitely bothered and then dresses and exits with considerable rapidity.  He’s going to have some careful explaining – or lack of explaining – to do if he’s not home very quickly.

Beckett doesn’t move for an instant after the front door closes.  Then she slowly gets up, sits on the side of the bed for a moment, and progresses to the hottest shower she can stand, trying to wash her brain clear at the same time she cleanses her body.  She has to get a grip of this.  _Okay, Kate.  Think_.  This is all completely out of hand.  What was she doing?  She thinks back over the last few days.  She’d been kissing him in an alley at dawn – in public! – and then she’d brought him back here and dressed up for him simply because he’d told her to in that wicked, beautiful, _I’m-in-charge_ voice that somehow doesn’t hit her brain before it takes control of her body.  Which in itself is not actually a problem.  She’s quite happy to have sex with someone so incredibly good at making _her_ feel incredibly good.  She knows what she likes, and Castle is proving to be exactly what she likes in bed.  But she shouldn’t be allowing him to kiss her in public.  That’s far, far too close to letting herself get into a relationship.  To letting him think that she’s open to a relationship.  _You just need to sort out the boundaries, Kate._   Yes.  No more kissing in public.  Not in alleys, not in dark car parks at 1 a.m. when there’s nobody around: not at all.  No more sleepovers.  Pull back, keep this controlled, limit the off-the-job contact to something she can manage.

She remembers that she needs to deal with his terminology.  This is not his _home_.  She can’t start thinking that they have anything that might involve going _home_.  There isn’t a _home_ , in the context of the two of them.  It’s a mutually enjoyable arrangement.  Nothing more.  _Boundaries, Kate.  Don’t make this into something it’s not._   She stops.  Why had she let him stay anyway?  Well, because he’d asked.  But she could have said no.  Why’d she not say no?  Because of the corpse: because of all the corpses that she needed to forget.  Because she’d needed him to help her forget.  Why’d he asked to stay?  Oh.  Oh shit.  What had she done?  She’d actually said out loud _Make me forget, Castle_.  Oh _shit_. 

She stands on her bathmat clinging to the towel round her, dripping and appalled.  _What did I say that for?_   Oh _shit_.  She can’t afford to be weak, to look for support, to allow someone to take care of her.  Especially when they’ve said they don’t want to.  It’ll all end badly if she does.  Apparent oaks always turn out to be ivy in the end, when the crisis comes.  Her dad had broken, and almost taken her with him: had taken five years to rebuild himself, but he’s never been the same paladin as he had been when she was a child.  Now she supports him, loves him despite his failures, but he’s not her support.  Not now. 

Sorenson had said he wanted a strong woman, but when crisis came he’d wanted it all his own way: thought that his career should mean that she’d sacrifice hers.  He’d thought that she’d cave in to his ultimatum.  But in the end she’d seen him for what he really was: a man who thought that merely being male was enough to have his own way in every matter, without discussion.  He’d thought that she’d simply follow, without complaint.   And when she’d objected; when the crisis came, he’d not even listened to her reasons.  He’d said it was because he wanted to take care of her, give her a home, a marriage, children; and she’d heard the subtext of _don’t worry about your job; it won’t matter when we’re married and you have babies_.  He’d never understood that she could take care of herself: that she needed an equal partner, not an old-fashioned head-of-the-household.  In the end, he couldn’t cope with the idea that her career was as important, as successful, as his.  He’d broken, in the face of her success, and his inability to deal with the consequences.  And then there had been that other.  She doesn’t think about that.

She’s done it all herself, as she’d had to.  Saved herself, climbed out the pit.  And learned along the way that you can’t rely on anyone, that taking care means taking control, that asking for help is just a way of showing that you’re weak, that you can’t do it for yourself.

While she’s been thinking, she’s unconsciously moved through her morning routine, and now she’s groomed and ready to go.  It’s still quite early.  There’s still time to salvage this: to keep it on an even, undemanding keel.  Because if she can’t bring this back to something she can manage, if she can’t be sure that this is going to stay well away from relationships and revelations and romance, she’ll need to quit.  She can’t afford to get into something where she’s invested.  It only ends badly. 

It always has ended badly.

* * *

 

By nine at the morgue Beckett’s already left a list of matters to be looked into and a decorated murder board in the bullpen for Ryan and Esposito’s amusement.  It’s had the convenient effect of shutting off any other considerations from her mind, too.  At least she knows where she is with murder, however gruesome.  One goal, one mission.  Just one solution.  All she has to do is find it.

Lanie’s relatively helpful: yes drowned, yes hit on the head.  So far, so yesterday.  Sleeping pill – okay, that’s new; ticket from Westchester – home run!  Or at least a lead.  Despite Castle’s sick jokes (she wonders what took him so long, and then remembers that he’d been… er… distracted last night.  This morning.  Aargh.  Now she’s distracted.)  nice suburban women just do not go down to lower Manhattan SROs to die.  Especially not with sleeping pills and motor oil.  There’s a mystery here.  And… likely someone will have noticed her missing by now.  Maybe even reported it.  A thread.  Already, a thread.  She’s energised, desperate to get back to her desk and start tugging on it. 

Lanie is deeply unsurprised to see Kate itching to get out the morgue and back to the bullpen.  She’s also unsurprised to see Castle following at equal speed.  However, she _was_ surprised to notice just how close to Kate Castle was standing, without Kate apparently noticing or caring.  Or killing him.  Hmm.  It’s at that point that Esposito rings her.

“Yo, Lanie.”

“Espo.  What do you want?  Beckett and Writer-Boy just left with the details.  They’ll be back to you shortly.”

“Yeah, I know.  Wanted to catch you before Beckett gets back.”  Lanie’s intrigued.

“Spill, Espo.  Quickly.”

“Me ‘n’ Ryan, we think Beckett’s a bit fonder of Writer-Boy than she lets on.”  Lanie smirks to herself.  Call themselves Detectives?  She’d worked that one out weeks ago.  Still, they’re men.  Feelings are not their bag.

“So?”

“So we got a little pool running.  When they’ll hook up.  Wanna join in?  Fifty dollars to play.”  Hmm.  Free money.  Lanie is sure that she’ll win this.  The question is, will Kate kill her if she finds out Lanie was betting on her?  No.  Kate’s her best friend.  Beat her up a little, maybe.  But not too much.

“Okay, I’m in.”

“So when d’ya think they’ll get together?”  Lanie thinks about this morning, and her evening with Kate a couple of weeks ago.  “Ryan said four weeks.  I reckon two.”  And then Lanie thinks about how stubborn and downright stupid Kate can be.

“Six.”  Esposito gasps. 

“Six?  Okay then.  Shit.  Gotta go.  They just walked in.”

* * *

 

Fortunately Espo has something for Beckett which prevents her noticing his flusterment.  It is indeed a missing person report.  Beckett doesn’t prevent her satisfied smile breaking through.  Nice suburban types are _always_ missed.  Still, no jumping to conclusions.  Time to go and interview this man.  Beckett’s fairly certain that he’ll turn out to be the husband.

It’s a reasonable way out to Westchester: a good 45 minutes at the best of times.  Castle thinks that this might be a good time to begin his plan for Beckett to show up at his loft and answer questions about police training and recruitment.  And she could usefully tell him her name, too.  He’d forgotten that he’d intended to wheedle that from her.

Beckett thinks that this – or maybe on the way back – might be a good time to correct Castle’s terminology and references to _going home_.  Maybe in the quiet privacy of her cruiser she can manage to explain the point without a problem.  She’s sure he’ll understand that it’s not appropriate in the context of their interactions.  She concentrates on negotiating the Manhattan traffic chaos – does nobody use their mirrors any more? – and on how she might raise the subject, and as a result she doesn’t notice that Castle’s talking for a few words after he’s begun.

“Sorry?  Missed that.”

“I need to know about the Academy, and becoming a cop.”  She sucks a breath through her teeth.  “For Nikki.  If I need to refer to how she got to be a Homicide detective, I need to get it accurate.  Otherwise the fans criticise me.”  He affects a pathetic, hurt-child voice.  “I don’t like it when they’re nasty to me.”  Beckett snorts.

“Like that would affect you.”  He humphs.  “However.  What d’you wanna know?”

“Everything.”

“Try the Encyclopaedia Britannica.  I only deal with cop matters.”  Castle growls.

“Everything about becoming a cop,” he says in a tone of strained patience.

“So ask, then.”

“I need to take notes while you’re telling me.  So actually, I thought that if I told you what I wanted now, you could come round later and I can add it to my storyboard.”  No. No no no.  That’s exactly what she’s avoiding: too much off the job contact.  He looks saintly.  “Captain Montgomery told me not to distract you from the job.”  Which stops Beckett’s nascent protest of _I’m not coming to your place_ dead, and leaves her frantically riffling through departmental regulations to discover whether there is one which will allow her to murder both her Captain and her infuriating shadow for causing her general annoyance and upset.  She must know enough about homicides to cover her tracks by now.  She doesn’t see – yet – how she’s going to avoid this.

“Why can’t you just take notes on a notepad?  I don’t have to come to yours to answer the questions.  It would be far better,” she says, working it out as she goes, to try to get out of going to his place, “if the four of us all went to a bar and you could get everyone’s take on it at once.  Different viewpoints.  Surely you need the background for your Roach characters too?”  The question ends on a wholly innocent note.

Castle’s view of Beckett’s intelligence and downright sneakiness takes another step upward.  That’s really a very clever suggestion.  In other circumstances, it might even have worked.  Though he has no idea why she wouldn’t want to come to his except that she’s desperate to avoid his family.  And he still doesn’t understand that, either.  The whole point, though, is that she comes to his.

“I’ve already talked to them.  I don’t want their views, I want the female perspective.  Unless you want to tell me something about them?”  Beckett snickers.

“If you’re going to ask Esposito whether he’s male or not I wanna know in advance.  I could sell tickets and make a fortune.”

“Are you trying to distract me, Detective?” Castle asks, suspiciously gently.  “Because when I want something I don’t get distracted easily.”  There are enough meanings freighting that statement that an encyclopaedia would be overwhelmed.  He leaves it hanging for a moment.  “I need answers, Beckett.  So will you come over and provide them or not?”

Trapped.  Dammit.  If she refuses, he’ll just go to Montgomery and she’ll be ordered to.  “If I’ve time.  The case comes first.” 

She’s abruptly thoroughly cross that he’s pushing her into visiting him, when he has to have worked out that she doesn’t want to, and then backing it up with the unspoken threat of her boss knowing that she’s not co-operating.  This is all moving – he’s pushing her – too far, far too fast.  She has to keep some boundaries.  Because otherwise she’ll become far too invested and it will just become another relationship disaster to add to her already wholly relationship-disaster-ridden life.  She is not going to ignore common sense and self-protection just because her body wants him.  Her annoyance with the way he seems to be trying to force the pace, inflamed by her own contradictory feelings, flares up.  She needs him to back off, give her space to re-establish her control of the case, and this whole blazing affair, and her life.  And he isn’t.  He’s pushing and pushing and pushing and she needs to make him stop.  She shouldn’t have let him stay.  That’s why he thinks he can keep pushing now: because it had worked last night.  He’d guessed that she’d needed him last night.  She’d as good as said so.  But she can’t afford to need anyone.

She takes a moment or two to calm herself down again.  She’s getting overly worried about this.  Massively overthinking it.  All she needs to do is re-establish some boundaries and common sense.  Starting with sorting out this ridiculous mis-statement of Castle’s about _going home_.  Of course he won’t have meant it, but better just to clear it up now, before it becomes a problem. 

“When you said last night ‘Let’s go home’,  I don’t really think that was a good choice of words.  We don’t have that” – she says _that_ but he hears _any_ – “sort of arrangement.”   She thinks she’s managing to explain calmly.  “I don’t think it’s a good idea to confuse matters like that, to make this into something it’s not.  You’ve got your home and I’ve got mine.  I wouldn’t want you to think I had any designs on your loft,”  she says lightly, trying to make a joke.

Castle sits in stunned silence in the passenger seat.  She’s using that same tone of sweet reasonableness that she used when explaining why she didn’t stay, as when she’d said that they weren’t dating: the one that implies that no-one could possibly disagree with the obvious common sense position and truth of her statement.  He’s trying to process Beckett’s words and coming up with nothing except an earthquake of hurt and anger.  She’s just knocked down all his assumptions about where this is – they are - getting to without even trying.  He thought she was coming closer.  She clearly thinks that they’re just as far apart as the night she spat that she didn’t want taken care of and didn’t want a relationship.  Even worse, it sounds like that’s where she wants to be.  She didn’t even use the word _relationship_.

“Oh?” he grits out, eventually.  “And what sort of arrangement _do_ we have, then?”  And then his fury and hurt get the better of him.  “In my world when someone’s been screaming my name under me and let me tie them to a bed that’s enough of a _relationship_ to justify saying that we’re going home.” 

And that statement, and its wholly unintended but underlying implication that he’s got a right to override her wishes just because they’ve had sex, lights up Beckett’s temper just like a skyrocket.  All her intentions to keep calm and deal with this in a reasonable, adult, well explained fashion go out the window.

“You’d know, wouldn’t you?  Well in _my_ world it doesn’t work like that.  In _my_ world you need to be a lot more involved before you can treat someone else’s place like your own.  I don’t think you have any claim on my home.  I don’t recall your name appearing on my lease.  And we do not have a _relationship_.  We are not that involved.”  She doesn’t say _nor will we be_.  It hangs unspoken in the air.

Nobody says anything more till they get to Westchester.  Castle is too blazingly angry to speak.  Beckett is almost equally angry with him trying to pretend this is something it’s not.  She can’t understand what his problem is.  It’s not as if she hasn’t been perfectly honest about what she doesn’t want.  To wit, a relationship.  Or being taken care of.  She’d only been trying to clear the position up.

When she pulls up at the husband’s house, before she can get out, Castle speaks again.

“Don’t think that this means you don’t have to answer my questions about procedure, Beckett.  You still do.  And you’re still going to do so at my loft so I can work on my storyboard to write my book.  Whether you like it or not.”

“Whatever,” she says, laden with boredom and attitude.  “Ask your questions.  I’ve been ordered to answer them, so I have to.  The sooner you finish your book the sooner you’ll be gone.”  She’s out the car before he can think of a retort, pulling her professional persona around her as she does her jacket.  She squashes her own upset at his reactions down and away.

Doing her job pulls Beckett’s mind firmly away from her own problems and into the case.  It’s not the most informative interview, but being firm with a grieving spouse is generally counterproductive.  The only nugget of information that helps is that the victim had a part-time job in Manhattan – but uptown.  Not downtown near a sleazy SRO.  Still, it’s a lead.  It’s about the only good thing to come out of this field trip.  Certainly the journey back will be unpleasant.  She still can’t see why he’s so angry when all she’s done is try to keep matters on an even, understood keel.  They’re not in a relationship, and they both agreed they weren’t going to be.  He should be happy that she’s sticking to it. She very carefully avoids the corollary to that thought: that he isn’t.  Happy, or sticking to the agreement.  And she certainly won’t think about why.  They have a deal.

Beckett calls Espo to follow up the employment lead, and then switches on the radio as soon as the engine fires and turns it up to a volume that makes it completely obvious that she doesn’t expect conversation.  Or quarrelling, which is much more likely.  Neither she nor Castle says a word, all the way back to the precinct.


	36. At that time of the night

When Beckett stalks into the bullpen Ryan and Esposito instinctively flinch.  She looks utterly pissed off, in a way they very rarely see and know potentially means trouble for everyone around her.  A second, furtive, glance tells them that Castle is also utterly pissed off, in a way that neither of them have seen to date and that Ryan, at least, finds very surprising.  Esposito puts the atmosphere together with his off-the-record discussion with a very different Castle from the precinct’s happy-go-lucky version and decides that this may be a good day not to make cheap cracks about anything that might be interpreted, in any way at all, even in one of Castle’s parallel universes, as them having a relationship.

“I’m just going to go make a coffee,” Ryan mutters to Espo.  “Hope you’ve got something to give Beckett.  She doesn’t look like she’s in a good mood.”

“Lanie bet on six weeks.  I thought she was dumb, seeing how they were behaving Friday.”

“Bet on what?” comes a unctuous, quiet voice behind him.  Espo jumps like a jackrabbit.

“Nothing, sir.  Nothing.”  Montgomery comes to stand in front of him and fix him with a penetrating stare.

“Hm.  Detective Esposito,” – he turns his head and includes Ryan in his glare – “Detective Ryan: if I thought either of you were wagering on the possibility of a sexual relationship between Detective Beckett and Mr Castle I would be truly disappointed…”  he pauses, meaningfully.  “I would be truly disappointed that you had not included me in your pool.”  Esposito chokes.  “So I’ll expect a visit from one of you at an appropriate time to allow me to place my bet.”  He leaves.  Ryan hightails it to the break room before anything more can go wrong, and promptly scalds himself.

Esposito does indeed have some new information for Beckett: he is simply well aware that she isn’t going to like it.  It seems that their nice suburban lady had been lying to her husband.  She doesn’t have a job – at least not where she said she did.  If she’s been lying about that, what else is she lying about?  Suddenly selling sex in an SRO seems like a likely call, and from there it’s just a very short and completely irresistible step to all sorts of theories.

Beckett is wholly and sarcastically unimpressed by the theories.  Her tone could be used to tan leather at a hundred paces, and it’s all directed at the three of them.  She’s clearly winding up to deliver a skin-flaying dressing down (which Esposito thinks – despite his active participation in thinking up all sorts of ridiculous theories – is very unfair, since it’s hardly his or Ryan’s fault that the victim was lying, nor is it their fault that Castle’s irritated her again) when the victim’s husband walks in.  He looks absolutely devastated.  Beckett’s bad mood falls off her in an instant as she ushers him into the interview room.  Castle automatically follows her.

The devastation is rapidly explained when Mr Goldman tells them that his wife wasn’t who he thought she was.  Not just the usual meaning, that she’d been cheating or lying or any of the normal ways in which murder brings deception to light – but she actually was not the woman whose name and Social Security number she’d used.  That’s astonishing.  Astounding.  It’s straight out the Day of the Jackal.  Beckett feels wholly sorry for Mr Goldman.  He’d trusted his wife, and it had all been a lie.  There’s nothing worse than your trust being destroyed: than people lying to you.

Beckett sighs, as soon as Goldman’s out the door.  Now she and the boys have to try and find out who the victim really was.  It’s going to be a long night of chasing DNA, fingerprints, and as many other databases as she can think of.  If she’s lucky, she’ll get a few hours downtime.  If they find some leads, that’ll be postponed till tomorrow.  Or the next day.  And it’ll be the break room couch for downtime and snatched naps, until it’s done. 

She doesn’t notice Castle standing in the interview room as she walks out into the bullpen and starts rapping out the orders in her normal brisk fashion.  She doesn’t notice that he doesn’t follow her out.  And she doesn’t notice when he goes home, without a word to anyone.  She’s far too busy following up anything that might provide a lead.

Ryan notices, though.  Ryan notices Castle leaving: very stiff about the shoulders, looking unusually large, very intimidating, and extremely angry.  And it’s Ryan who, as soon as he can do so without anyone noticing, taps out a text to Castle.  _What’s up?_

Castle’s gone home to soothe his savage feelings before he does something stupid.  Stupid, in this context, meaning starting another wholesale row with Beckett in the precinct.  He can’t believe the extent of her capacity to hurt him without even realising it.  He can’t believe he’s got himself into this position.  But this time it isn’t his fault that they fought.  It _isn’t_ , he thinks angrily.  Even if he lost his temper first, she started it.  How can she still think they don’t have a relationship?

Or… does she?

He likes that thought much better.  Almost enough to calm down.  Certainly enough to partake of a soothing glass of good red wine rather than his first inclination when he came in, which had involved throwing back several fingers of whiskey.  Under the gentle influence and the comforting warmth of the alcohol on his tongue, he retrieves a thought he’d first had some days ago: that Beckett is quite astonishingly uncomfortable with openness and emotion.  _Any_ openness and emotion: her own, his, or from anyone around her.

Umm.  He’d already seen that: he’d noticed that every time she opens up she promptly closes off and backs away; he’d noticed her extreme and unjustified discomfort with his family’s enthusiasm.  He also, now he thinks about it, notices a pattern.  Open up, inadvertently; divert, distract, deny – with sex or with anger, or both; back away, pick a fight, try to make him step back, break off.  Every time he inadvertently tries to  _take care_ of her, every time he does something, anything, that might make her think that they have something other than a series of one-night stands, she backs off twice as fast and slams the barriers into place.

Running away.  She’s – running away from a relationship.  She’s running away so fast because she’s scared.  _I see you, Beckett_.  She’s scared that this might mean something more to her than a one-night stand.  He’s winning.  She’s fighting it, fighting him, fighting herself, again, but he’s winning.  It soothes the sting of his hurt, and the bruise to his pride.  Because, he realises, this time she hadn’t just admitted a little bit of her past, she’d as good as said she’d needed him.

But running is not the way it’s going to be.  She doesn’t get to run away from him till he’s ready to let her go.  And she won’t need to run any time soon.  He just has to go back to what he’d realised, less than ten days ago – how could he have forgotten so quickly? – that all he needs to do is play along, act like he’s happy with the present situation, and wait for her to realise that he’s not a luxury, but a necessity.  Which she will do, because she needed him last night.  Then she’ll stop this running away trick.  He’s just got a bit ahead of himself, that’s all.  _Stupid, Rick.  You knew what to do.  Just do it._   He can act.  He can play it cool.  He’s very patient, when he wants something. 

In which case, in pursuit of the far greater goal, he can mend this particular fight.  He just needs to apologise, even if it’s through gritted teeth, for the mis-step and take a bit more care with his words.  (he does far too much of this apologising business where Beckett is concerned, but he can bite the bullet – and last time she apologised too, which helps, so maybe this time she will as well)  But she is still going to turn up at his loft and answer his questions.  He’s not letting her avoid that.  Or avoid him.  If matters should go well, and if she happens to believe that that’s another one-night stand… well, ain’t that a shame, as the song goes?

And he’s got his trump card, still tucked away, too.  Clark’s got the file, and soon enough he’ll have some answers for her; something to take her pain away. Then she’ll understand that he’s the only person who can satisfy her needs effectively, whether it’s in bed or out of it; she’ll see that someone taking care of her, in moderation, is a good thing (he doesn’t want a clinging vine, just a little give and take – especially _take_ , mmmm) and everything will fall into place at that point, if it hasn’t already.  She likes him best – or he irritates her least (well, outside bed) - when he helps her solve a murder in the precinct, so she’ll be delighted if he helps her solve this case, because this one means far more to her.  He smiles ferally to himself.  Okay, he’s resumed normal service.  Now he’s ready to advance on the new front in this scene from the sex war.

His phone beeps cheerily.  Ryan: _What’s up?_   Well, that’s an interesting development.   

He replies _Not good at searching databases.  It’s boring.  If you finish before the bars close, I’ll buy you a drink.  If not, see you tomorrow.  Let me know._   He wants to know if Beckett’s like this with the others, or just him.  If it’s just him… well.  That’s an admission that Beckett won’t realise she’s making.  You don’t react like she does if there aren’t some pretty strong feelings there.  But, although it would be quite contrary to what he thinks he knows of her personality, it’s worth finding out if she behaves like that often, or with everyone. 

He wanders off to prepare dinner confident that he’s got a winning strategy.  He’s still going to make it work, exactly as he chooses.  He’ll get exactly what he wants, just the way he wants it.  It’s just taking a little longer than he expected.

He utterly fails to realise that he isn’t just playing a whole different ball-game from his previous encounters with women, he’s now playing a whole different sport.

* * *

 

Beckett and the boys are running endless searches, till their eyes are close to bleeding and their vision blurring.  None of them are helping find the real identity of this woman, and the tech team can’t get them her laptop in an accessible fashion till the morning.  Around nine-thirty, all the enquiries that they can make tonight have been made, and Beckett releases Esposito and Ryan to whatever nocturnal experiences might take their fancy.  In the elevator Ryan’s simultaneously texting and explaining to Esposito that Castle’s paying for the beers, which finds considerable favour, even if they will have to listen to way-out theories.  A bar with pool tables and some good microbrew is selected and arrangements made.

An hour and a half later there’s a cheerful three-way contest on the pool table.  Ryan’s losing, but he’s used to that.  Espo and Castle are, again, neck and neck.  Castle, still carrying a heavy undercoat of wanting to win Beckett, is not inclined to lose at anything else, and is gradually defaulting towards the focused, hard-edged personality that he normally keeps well hidden in the precinct.  When Ryan comes back with another three bottles of beer he notices the change.  Not being nearly as stupid or as naïve as a number of unfortunate and jailed criminals have thought him to be based on his looks, however, he bides his time until Espo’s taken a short break.

“You okay?”  Castle takes his shot and smiles with feral satisfaction as the ball drops cleanly into the centre pocket.  Ryan applauds gently.

“Yeah.”  It sounds true to Ryan.  “Why shouldn’t I be?”

“You left a little fast.  Didn’t wave goodbye or anything.  Don’t you love us any more?”  Castle manufactures a sheepish look and, since he’s been handed the perfect opening, rapidly constructs the way to find out what he wants to know.

“I’m buying the beer, aren’t I?  Why would I stay around to watch you run searches and get bored, with Beckett in that mood?  I didn’t want to be responsible for multiple homicides.  You gotta admit she was revving up for it.”  He pauses, fakes concern for his own safety in the presence of a seriously irritable Beckett well enough to fool Ryan.  “Does she go off on one like that often?”  Ryan shrugs.

“Naw.  We wouldn’t work with her if she did.  Who wants to work with a diva?”  Castle winces.  He lives with one, and had been married to another.  “Hardly ever, and only if she’s really stressed out.”

“What d’you do to sort it out?”  That’s a dangerous question, treading very close to the line of what he might be able to ask without alerting Ryan to his real motives.

“Leave her to work through it; or sometimes call Lanie and drag us all into a bar.  It’s always because of the job.  She gets twitchy when nothing pops on a case.  She’s kinda insulted when that happens.  But if we leave her to it, she’ll keep working till she finds something.  It’s easiest that way.”

Ah.  More than he’d hoped to learn.  Much more.  So, she’s not normally as easily angered. He puts that together with  _make me forget_ and deduces that she’s not just been infuriated by him, but she’s also been seriously disturbed by this case.   _She’s heading for burnout_ .  That’s interesting.  More interesting, though, is that she deals with it by working through it.  In which case… she’ll likely still be working now.  In which case… he could usefully go home via the precinct and (ugh) apologise.  Mend matters.  Show he’s the bigger person.  If she’s not there, then he’s not going to follow her home, though.  That’s a long step too far.  He’s not a lapdog.

While he’s been thinking, he’s mechanically kept potting balls.  He’s down to the eight-ball now, and sinks it neatly in the left corner.  Ryan looks at him a little oddly.

“That was impressive.  Little more focused than usual, Castle?” 

“Just lucky.”  He smiles in his usual happy-go-lucky way, reining back any other aspects of his personality.  “Want another beer?”  But he’s noticed Ryan starting to look at the door, and when Espo returns it’s clear that the boys are ready to quit.  He doesn’t argue.

Castle hails a cab and makes sure that the boys are out of earshot when he gives the Twelfth’s address.  He thinks he’s gone as far as he can by questioning Ryan, who’s sure to mention it to Espo at some point, without giving them food for thought and what would be likely to be entirely too accurate deductions. 

When he slips quietly out of the elevator the bullpen is dark and silent.  There’s no puddle of light around the murder board, no Beckett sitting on the desk, swinging her feet and glaring at it until it gives her some answers out of sheer terror.  Even if inanimate objects don’t normally feel fear, Beckett’s glare would inspire it in them.  She’s not at her desk: her lamp is out.  The desk is, however, messier than she normally leaves it.  That is to say, it has two pieces of paper on it.  Neatly on it.  But normally when she leaves her desk is completely empty.  Her screen is off, though.  The break room windows show that area to be dark, and there’s no noise from the coffee machine.  She must have gone home. Well, he’s not pursuing her home so he can apologise.  He’s not that sorry.  He’s not that sorry at all, and he’s only doing this in pursuit of the greater goal.  She ought to apologise, too.  It takes two to fight.

Which is when he trips over the protruding edge of the bottom drawer of her desk, invisible in the gloom, and barely saves himself from crashing full-length.  What the hell is that doing open, ambushing unwary visitors?  He sits down hard in Beckett’s chair and peers at the damage done to his calf with the assistance of the light from his phone.  The corners of these drawers are unpleasantly sharp.  Out of the corner of his eye he notices the handle of Beckett’s purse.  He reverts to perusing the already-swelling bruise on his leg, and prods it gently.  The sharp pain does not improve his mood.  On the other hand, it does kick his brain into action.  Beckett’s purse is here?

That means that Beckett is here.  Somewhere.  He closes the drawer before it can attack him again, and starts to search.  First, the gym.  She could easily be taking her frustration out on the punchbag.  He quietly slips up the stairs and investigates, prowling through the dingy room and not failing to listen very carefully in case the showers are running.  They’re not.  And there is no sound that would indicate that someone is anywhere within the showers or restrooms.  These rooms are completely empty, as he would expect, at midnight.  He returns to the bullpen, and does what he should have done first, had he not been distracted by the feral drawer.  Though he should be grateful to it, since had he not fallen over it he wouldn’t have realised that Beckett was still here.  He pads over to the break room and peers around the edge of the door, taking care not to shine the light from his phone screen through it.  He lets his eyes adjust to the scant light dribbling into the bullpen from the streetlamps, and listens very hard.  Very faintly, he can hear breathing.  He slides his phone into his pocket in order not to waken whoever is there – though really there can only be one candidate for this particular form of insanity – and slides around and into the room, silently.

And naturally, there is Beckett, a rolled-up blanket under her head, another one crumpled on the floor beside her, which had likely started over her.  Her shoes are neatly placed together at the end of the couch.  She’s fast asleep, phone by her head, lashes sweeping down and depositing already-smudged make-up on her face; the dark lines against her cheek delineating the dark rings below her closed eyes as bars delineate a cell.  In the dim light, the shadows pool around the sharp lines of her cheekbones, the edge of her jaw. She’s taken off the jacket she’d had over her scarlet tee, but otherwise she’s still dressed just as she had been.  Without her driving personality inhabiting her face and posture the traces of stress and tiredness are painfully clear.

Castle gazes down at her for a few moments, sizing up his options and his aims.  He’d steeled himself to apologise, which is a pursuit that he abhors; but there is no point in apologising to a sleeping Beckett.  He could, of course, wake her: ask her why she’s still here (but he knows why); suggest that she might go home (but he knows she won’t); and then apologise.  If he wakes her, however, she’s unlikely to be receptive.  Even if he takes the infinitely desirable option of waking her with a kiss.  Smudged make-up, tousled hair and slightly dishevelled clothing reminds him of the way he likes to see her, ruffled and aroused, stretched out across a – his – bed,  knowing that when he touches her she’ll be ready, and open, and his.  Dark possessive instinct says _wake her, take her home, take her_.  Vestiges of intelligence and strategic planning say _No, stalk your prey more carefully, now is not the time._

He watches for a short while, in case she wakes.  Instead, she shivers in her sleep, curls up more tightly against some dream-chill.  Castle, since there’s no-one to see, indulges his protective feelings, being unable to indulge his more primitive ones, tucks the discarded blanket over her and drops a kiss on her hair.  It’s hardly satisfying, and he leaves for home edgy, irritated and frustrated.


	37. Can't read my poker face

The morning does not bring much peace, or cure Castle’s irritation. 

Explaining the current state of the case to his overly-interested family merely leads into comments from Alexis that it’s crazy, and from his mother that the woman must have been a criminal.  Or a spy.  Which translates, in Castle’s mind, to being an extremely good actress.  It would have been okay, if he hadn’t then opened his mouth and said precisely that.  It could still have been okay, if his mother hadn’t taken the opportunity to open her own mouth.  She knows he threw the last hand on Monday night.  _Very_ fortunately, she (and Alexis) believe that he did it so as not to embarrass Beckett, rather than his real reasons.  They’re not impressed, though.  The word _patronising_ is particularly stinging.  When his phone rings and there’s a reason to go to the precinct he jumps at it.

Behind him, as Alexis leaves for school, Martha considers her options.  Richard had been astonishingly stupid in throwing his hand, and if he actually manages to realise his evident hopes it could be severely deleterious if Detective Beckett finds out accidentally, later in their relationship.  Time, she thinks, for some motherly assistance.  It’s absolutely not meddling.  Just… helping Richard to achieve the most desirable outcome.  One should always support one’s child.  When one approves of his goals.

Martha considers the position some more.  She very much likes what she’s seen of Detective Beckett, though she was as unreadable during the poker game as she had been at any previous time.  Alexis likes her, too.  Richard’s evidently smitten, though.  She hasn’t seen him as protective as he had been on Sunday morning since… well.  Well, well, well.  Since Kyra, certainly.  On the other hand, Detective Beckett does not appear to need protection.  Or, for that matter, Richard.  And Richard had better understand that in short order, or it will all end badly.  She’d like to see him happy, and if Detective Beckett makes him happy, then Martha will do her best to help him have Detective Beckett.  Even if she’d _told_ Richard the detective was far too good for him, that was only to keep his ego in check.  Of course they would be wonderful together.  It was perfectly clear from the way they looked – and looked at each other - when they were at the fundraiser that they should be together.  In fact, it almost looked as if they already were.  Martha shakes her head.  She’s sure that if Richard had already got together with his stunning Detective she’d have noticed.  If only because he could never have kept it quiet.  But still, any extraneous items that might be in the way should be cleared from their path.  Such as deliberately letting Detective Beckett win and keeping it secret.

Decision made, Martha puts in a call and is shortly talking to Detective Beckett, who seems remarkably unconcerned by Martha’s revelation.  Completely uncaring, in fact.  That’s rather disappointing.  Martha had expected some interest in why she might be calling – which had been noticeably, if very politely – lacking; and some reaction to being informed that Detective Beckett had been allowed to win – which had been completely absent.  She wonders, far too late for it to do any good at all, if calling Detective Beckett had really been such a good idea.  If she’s that indifferent, Richard’s already flogging a dead horse.

* * *

 

Beckett had woken early and uncomfortable, though strangely the blanket had still appeared to be around her.  That’s unusual.  Once she’d changed and showered at the precinct, she had spent some time glaring at her murder board until she could legitimately call the cyber team and start to pry the information out of the circuit boards of the laptop.  When they have, there’s a new lead.  With some considerable irritation at the necessity, Beckett tells Ryan to call Castle to come and see.  She has no desire to speak to him.  She also, however, has no desire to be pulled up by Captain Montgomery for disobeying orders. 

She’s interrupted by a call on her landline.  She doesn’t get too many of those, so she’s initially puzzled.  When she realises it’s Castle’s mother, that changes to being wary.  When she hears what the woman has to say, she’s absolutely, incandescently furious.  Beckett calls on every last scrap of her self-control to remain utterly calm and not to reveal a single iota of what she feels.  Castle’s mother had no business ringing her and interfering – and why did she do that, anyway?  What possible interest could she have in the outcome of a poker hand that she’d already folded from?  And if this is some obscure – or stupid – way of trying to show her, Beckett, how selfless and caring her son is (and by implication hoping to improve Beckett’s view of him) then it has backfired quite, quite spectacularly. 

Anyway.  Neither Castle’s meddling mother nor Castle needs to know just how infuriated she is.  But she’s not going to lose her temper at Castle.  She’s not even going to shout.  She’s not going to give either of them the satisfaction.  But her sheer, overwhelming rage has overcome all good sense and incinerated her boundaries.  She’s going to give him back his money (she laments the Ferragamos for a short second) and he can play again – fairly.  She doesn’t care where she has the revenge match, at his apartment or hers or the middle of Central Park on the carousel.  Then she will take him for every last cent in his pockets, or she’ll lose, on her own merits.  Not because some rich spoilt asshole thinks he needs to be  _nice_ to the little woman just because he’s slept with her.  Patronising, chauvinistic swine.  Put together with buying her an evening dress instead of trusting that she had one, (she ignores that she hadn’t had one that she would have been happy to wear) it all adds up to one thing: he doesn’t think she’s capable of taking care of herself.  In fact, he’s treating her like a child who needs to be humoured in case they’ll be upset by losing or looking out of place, rather than a mature woman who can deal with whatever life brings.  Worse, he doesn’t think she can pay her own way.  He can have the dress back, too, then.  She can buy her own appropriate apparel. She’ll pack it up tonight and deliver it to his apartment immediately thereafter.  This is 2009, not 1959.  She can pay her own way and manage her own life.  Castle can go teach a fish to ride a bicycle.

Castle doesn’t necessarily expect Beckett to be in any better mood with him than she had been yesterday, and he is not disappointed.  If anything, the fire banked in her eyes and the edge in her tone are more apparent.  She’s uninterested in his greeting, unaffected by his presence (no matter how close he stands) and indifferent to his comments.  His never-strong impulse to apologise is receding faster than the tide just before a tsunami.

It seems that their victim was corresponding with a Lee: and further seems like it’s a boyfriend.  With no other leads, this one’s location is tracked down by the clever techs in Cyber, and shortly Castle is pursuing the rapid, aggravated clack of Beckett’s heels, rapping out chilly annoyance with every stride.  The same icy irritation infects the cruiser and their journey proceeds in uncomfortable silence.  Just like yesterday, really.  Except all Beckett’s barriers are up, and instead of the heated, fiery fury, that he can just about manage to deal with because at least it means that she’s focused on him, it’s the glacial permafrost that takes her further away from him with every minute.

He begins to suspect, with a sense of squirming dread, that something else has been added to yesterday’s disastrous conversation.  This time, however, it can’t possibly be his fault.  He hasn’t done anything… oh _shit._   Suddenly it’s all terribly, transparently clear.  Somehow – and he’s sure he knows not just how but _who_ – Beckett has learned that he threw his hand. And she doesn’t like it.

Whatever yesterday’s rights and wrongs, now he really does owe her an apology, because he would never have done that with – to – anyone else.  Not that he’d have had the motive to do it, either.  But all it’s got him, instead of a receptive Beckett, is the re-establishment of as large an ice-shelf as it’s possible to have without actually being in Antarctica.

Just before they knock on their suspect’s door, precisely timed so that Castle can’t start an argument, Beckett counts off a sheaf of bills and presents them to Castle with exaggerated formality and considerable care that she doesn’t touch him at all.

“What's this?” but he knows perfectly well what it is.  A barrier the size of the Hoover Dam.

“Your winnings from the other night. I'm not an idiot. I know you threw the last hand.”  He hates it when she sounds like this: when she treats him like that spoilt, arrogant playboy that his publicity makes him out to be; when it’s right back to the original cold contempt with a side order of disgust and a sprinkling of hatred.

“How did you figure it out?”  He knows how.  He just wants to keep her talking, in the hope that he can use his words and intelligence to talk her out of this, show her that he didn’t mean to disparage or disrespect her.  Quite how he’s going to achieve that without admitting what he had wanted, which will not help at all, he doesn’t know.  What had he been thinking?

“That's not the point.”  More disgust.  She really isn’t going to care about his reasons, and something tells him that trying to cure this by using physical proximity and attraction is likely to fail.  Epically, as Alexis might say.

“Oh, my mother called you, didn't she?”  He knows she did, and very shortly he is going to have a long and detailed discussion with his mother.  He’d thought she _liked_ Beckett.

“You owe me a rematch.”  That’s a – better outcome than he was expecting.  Though she doesn’t look as if the thought gives her any pleasure at all.  He accepts before she has any chance at all to think better of it, and even more happily than that he’s got the perfect set up.

“Fine. You want to play? Let's play. How about tomorrow night?”  Oh yes, they’ll play.  No holds barred.  He’ll hold her.  Then he’ll take her.  Once she’s on his territory he’ll be back in control of this game.  She does _not_ get to shut him out like this.

“With your mystery buddies?”  She doesn’t sound impressed, considering she’s got a huge collection of crime fiction, including samples of all of their works too.

“What, are you kidding? No, no, no. Those guys would eat you alive. No. I was thinking something a little more local. My, uh, Gotham City crew. Guys I beat on a regular basis.”  He knows exactly what he’s doing now.  Right back to the beginning again.  Rile her up, and let anger spark heat, and then let that heat boil over and melt her ice.

“Your Gotham City crew?”  Not enough anger.  In fact, not any.  Still cold contempt.  He needs her to get angry.

“Yeah.  The Captain, the Mayor, and Judge Markway. You know. Your boss. Your boss's boss, and the guy that signs your warrants. Or would that make you nervous? I mean, I wouldn't want to throw your game, but I also don't want you to feel patronised.”

“Just set it up. And prepare to get your ass kicked.”  She’s still glacial, but his tone of _I-bet-you’re-scared_ has had the desired effect.  There’s a very heavy current of anger under it now.  He’d push harder, rile her further, but her timing is perfect: she’s already knocking on an – open door?  Her professional shell is straight back on, and she walks straight on in. 

It’s a shrine to the victim.  Photos, news clippings, more pictures: the victim is everywhere.  It’s looking suddenly simpler: crazed stalker equals psycho killer.   Until the sharp-faced, hard eyed woman turns out to be a true crime writer, and their victim turns out to be a killer herself.  An eco-terrorist, who’d bombed an oil tanker, killed one of her accomplices and almost killed the captain, who’s been in hiding for nearly twenty years, and who’d suddenly decided to tell her story.

Copies of the writer’s – Lee Wax?  Gotta be a pseudonym – information will be transported to somewhere it can actually do some good: Beckett’s murder board.  Interviewing her doesn’t make Beckett like her any better, and even if she’s still livid with Castle it doesn’t mean she wants to watch this piranha eyeing him up.  Though it’s Beckett she wants a favour from.  No way.  One pestilent, infuriating, patronising writer is enough.  Beckett leaves them to it, not failing to insult Castle as she leaves.  She sees it hit home.

Castle doesn’t want to exchange compliments with this second-rate hack.  He’s seen the look in her eye and although it’s flattering that she’s sizing him up he’s not interested.  He knows this type: more interested in his wallet and fame than his personality, and out to use him.  He’s seen enough of them, and run them off.  Still, this is a witness.  He’ll let her think there’s a chance he’ll tip her the wink, to keep her sweet.  Like hell there is, though.  He has far more self-respect than that.  He doesn’t cheat, and that would be cheating the case.  And why anyone would think he’d pass on a real, fiercely honest woman for a sleaze like Lee Wax he does not know.

Not that the real woman wants to speak to him.  It’s a chilly journey to the next potential suspect, and it’s a chilly journey back again.  The radio stays turned up loud, preventing any attempt at conversation, and in-car cameras or not Castle is perfectly certain from the tone of Beckett’s silence that any move to touch it will result in his removal from the car and probably from life.  She’s shut down her anger, shut him out.  Every time she does that she’s trying to push him away.  He’s not going to have it.  She’s his and she admitted it and she is not going to run away from him.   Them.  He just needs to fix his screw-up.  If he’d remembered about Beckett’s granite integrity two days ago before he threw the game it might have helped.  If he’d remembered that she is nothing like any of the other women he’s been with that would have helped too.  If he hadn’t lost his temper yesterday that would also have been a good start.

He tries conversation back in the bullpen, but Beckett turns her shoulder and only gives him back contemptuous sarcasm about his need for a story.  He picks up the Wax manuscript automatically and takes it with him to the cruiser for the next interview.

Esposito’s found out enough for them to track down the other member of the bomb squad – he’d done fifteen years, but now he’s out, cleaning the streets and keeping the lowest profile he can.  He claims to be wracked with guilt that one of them died: that he’d mistimed the bomb.  Well, maybe, thinks Beckett, professionally cynical and suspicious.  But she’ll be looking into this man very hard indeed.  There’s no such thing as honour among thieves – or murderers.  High ideals normally turn out to be low motives.  Thinking of which...

“You can go home now, Castle,” she says, coldly.  She’s had quite enough of him today.  Keeping her boiling anger locked down under the permafrost of her control is becoming increasingly difficult.  She wants him gone.  It’ll give her enough time to calm herself down before she takes the dress back.  She’s not a coward, and she will take it back and have the guts to tell him to his face exactly _why_ she has handed it back.  But she’s not doing that the same night as she has to sit through a poker game that she intends to win.

“Beckett...”

“Not interested.  Go home.  Nothing more is going to happen today.”  She pulls the cruiser into the kerb and waits, very obviously, for him to get out.

“Going back to the precinct, Beckett?”  She doesn’t bother answering.  “Is the break room couch comfortable?”  He’s pushing.  Anything to make her angry.  “It didn’t look it.”  There’s a sharp draw of breath, an arrow of annoyance.

“None of your business where I choose to be.”  This is not going to improve any if he keeps talking.  She might just say something even more hurtful.  Such as _with someone else_.  He takes the papers, opens the car door and starts to step out, then leans back in.

“Till tomorrow, Beckett,” he says.  “You can’t drive me away.”  She pulls off without another word.

It’s still quite early in the evening.  Alexis is doing her homework upstairs, and his mother appears to be contemplating a glass of wine.  Perfect.

“Mother.  Just the person I wanted to talk to.”  His tone is not inviting.  His mother misses it entirely.

“What is it, darling?”

“Why did you tell Beckett I threw my hand?”  She doesn’t miss the edge this time.

Martha tosses her head.  “She deserved to know the truth.  You weren’t going to tell her, now, were you?  It didn’t sound as if she cared, anyway.  No harm done.”

“No harm done?  Thanks to your revelations she’s treated me like something you scrape off your shoe all day.  I’d say you’ve done quite enough harm.”  His mother isn’t looking nearly contrite enough for his taste.  In fact, she’s looking as if something’s just fallen into place.

“What are you thinking, Mother?”

“Oh, nothing, kiddo.  Nothing at all.”  Since wringing his mother’s neck is not an approved method of family therapy, Castle is left with no comeback.  Fortunately, Alexis comes downstairs in the hope that there will be dinner shortly and turns the conversation back to the intriguing subject of the case.

Dinner done, case discussion prompting ideas about whose tale this really was – Wax’s or a plant by the dead woman to put her side of the story without anyone to contradict her – Castle’s reading the manuscript after Alexis and his mother have disappeared – Alexis to study for the rest of the evening, his mother God-knows-where – there’s a forceful rap at the door.  When Castle opens it, he’s presented with a large box, which is concealing the Ross ice-shelf otherwise known as Detective Beckett, still dressed as she had been for work with her gun on her hip.

“I’m returning this to you.”  What the hell?  He hasn’t lent her anything.  He takes the box and waits for her to enter.  She looks as frozen-faced as he’s ever seen her.

“Returning what?” he says blankly.  He takes the box to his study, and Beckett follows him.  She shuts the door behind her.  Ice, spreading from the cold of her demeanour, is creeping into his veins.  Nothing good about this situation occurs to him.  He flicks the lid open as she speaks and looks down into the box.

“Returning the dress you provided for the fundraiser.”  _What the fuck?_   Neatly folded, and with that certain finished look that argues the use of a top-of-the-line cleaning service, is the dress he’d given her, together with the underwear.  She’s just thrown his gift back in his face.  For a moment he just looks at it, trying to hide the instant agony in his chest.  He wonders, briefly, if it’s cardiac arrest or just his heart breaking.   

“I don’t take anything from people who don’t respect me.  Give it to someone who actually needs your charity.  There’s a good thrift shop over on the East Side.”  Every word bites like the tips of a cat-o-nine-tails.

“I can buy my own dresses, dress appropriately for any occasion, and cover my card losses.  Though you clearly don’t think that’s the case.  I don’t know what sort of pathetic bimbos you’re used to meeting, but I’m not one of them.  Nor am I a child to be looked after.  I don’t need your money and I don’t need your patronising efforts to _improve_ me.  So I’ve returned both.  We’re all square.”  She turns away and grasps the door handle.  She hasn’t raised her voice beyond its normal speaking volume for any single syllable, yet he could have heard every word from the other end of Central Park, so precisely enunciated had they been. 

He looks down at the dress again and remembers her in it.  It pulls the pin from the grenade of his fury.

“That was _not_ why I got the dress.”  He puts a hand on the door to stop it opening.  Not putting hands on Beckett to prevent her leaving is almost impossible.  But he is still not that man.  Provocation is _never_ an acceptable excuse.

“Really, Castle.”  It’s not even a question.  She sounds bored of the subject already.  She’s come in, dropped her latest scarifying bombshell, and now she’s intending to leave.  No.  They will _have_ this argument.  She doesn’t get to shut him down like this and walk away.


	38. Close enough to start a war

“You’ve had your say, now I’m going to have mine.  Or are you the only one here who gets to talk?”

She leans insolently on the wall, apparently completely unbothered that he’s prevented her opening the door, and looks at him as if there’s nothing he could possibly say that would change her view.  He tamps down his fury to a level where the entire block will not hear every word.  Publicity is not going to help.

“Say what you want to, then.”  He hears _but I don’t have to listen_.  The pinpoint precision of her uninflected words reminds him that she is at least as angry as he. 

“I didn’t get you the dress because I thought you didn’t have something appropriate.”  He stops.  Beckett produces a look of utter disbelief, that only angers him further.  How can she think that he would behave like that?  She always dresses well.  He’s forgotten that he had told her that he knew she didn’t have a suitable dress.

“I got it because I knew you’d look absolutely amazing in it.”  He just stops himself saying _and out of it.  I wanted to peel you out of it.  And I did._  She doesn’t look impressed at all.  “You didn’t object then.  It wasn’t a loan.  It was a gift.  Which you’ve just flung back as if it were an insult.”

“And you don’t think you’ve insulted me?  Maybe you had good motives for giving me a dress” – her voice conveys her complete contempt for that concept – “but put together with _letting me win_ you’ll forgive me for my disbelief.”  Sharpened katanas would cut less deeply than her words.  “I don’t need your charity.”

“It _wasn’t_ charity,” he rasps.  His fists are clenched behind his back.  If she makes a move nearer to the door, he can’t be certain any longer that he won’t stop her.

“What do you call it, then?  Handing out money that I didn’t earn or win fairly?  I call that _charity_.  Well, I don’t need it.  And if that’s the way you think of me, I _certainly_ don’t need you.”  Oh shit.  She carries on, Juggernaut flattening his hopes.  He hasn’t seen her this angry since… oh fuck.  Since the nanny.  “I pay my own way.  I don’t need some rich, spoilt playboy throwing his money around because he doesn’t think the _little woman_ can cope.” Her venom would poison the Great Lakes.  “I don’t need some arrogant, chauvinistic _idiot_ ” – he hears _asshole_ – “buying me clothes or giving me an allowance.  So you can take your money and your _gift_ and shove it up your ass.”  Her voice has risen as she goes.   She’s nearly shouting, now.

He looks into the abyss in front of him – and takes half a step back from the edge.  _Tread softly, for you tread on my dreams_.  If he doesn’t tread very softly indeed, all his dreams of more than a series of individual encounters are very rapidly going to turn to nightmares.

“I’m sorry.  I’m sorry I threw the game.”  There’s only one way out of this mess, and that’s truth.  Her eyes are still cold and hard, her lips pinched.  “I screwed up.  I didn’t want …”

“Didn’t want _what_ , Castle?”

“Didn’t want you to be angry ‘cause you lost and then go home.  I wanted you to stay.  Except I couldn’t tell if you were bluffing or not either and it was easier just to fold.”

“ _What?_ ”  For the first time since she came into the loft Beckett’s acquired an expression that doesn’t consist of concentrated, chilled abhorrence.  Now she looks utterly shocked and appallingly hurt.  She looks, in fact, as if he’s stabbed her.  He’s still trying to work out why when she slams down all her shutters.  She’s sheet white, her eyes blazing.  Fast calculations, the shifts of expression that she shows when she’s playing out murder scenarios in her head, are running over her face. 

 “So which was it, Castle?  You wanted me to stay and have sex with you” – she sees the truth hit him hard – “or you couldn’t tell if I was bluffing?  Because from where I’m standing all I see is you manipulating matters to get your own way.  Right from the start that’s what you’ve done.  You manipulated your way into the Tisdale case, and then into the precinct, and into producing that dress, and now you’re saying that you were prepared to manipulate events so that you could get into bed with me last Monday.”

She won’t say that he’d manipulated her into bed already.  She’d made her own decisions about falling into bed, with her eyes wide open.  She’s not going to blame him for her choices.

“You think that?  You really think that was all?  If you cared about that why’d you go to bed with me?  You knew exactly what was happening.  I didn’t notice you complaining any time.  And now you care about it?  Just because I threw the last hand in the poker game?”  He’s getting angrier by the instant.  And then she launches her ICBM.

“Tell me, Castle, are you used to paying for sex?  Because that’s what you’re telling me you were doing.  You’re telling me that you gave me money so I’d go to bed with you.  You know what we call that, we cops?  We call it prostitution.  Nice to know what you think of me.  No wonder you gave your character a stripper name.”  She’s so furious now that she’s firing accusations like semi-automatic slugs: anything to hurt him as badly as he’s hurt her.   She can’t feel anything past the agonising pain in her chest.

He’s standing, slack-faced and silent with shock as her words sink in.  She reaches for the door handle again.

“I’m going.”  She can’t stay.  She rams down her shattering pain that he’d effectively thought he could pay her to have sex with him.  All she has to do is get out of here in one piece.

“ _No_.  That’s _not_ what I think.  Never.  How can you believe I would think that?  You have to listen to me.”   _Fuck_.  This could not be going worse.  She’s totally misunderstood him.  He leans heavily on the door.  “This discussion is _not done_.” 

“Oh, I think it’s done, Castle.  I really think we’re done.”  She’s dropped back into glacial indifference, to get out of here without breaking down.

“We’re _not_ done.  I just wanted you to stay the other night.  I don’t think that about you.  I _don’t_.  You can’t go.  Please, don’t go.” 

“You’re going to stop me leaving?  I don’t think so.”  Her hand has dropped to her hip, and her gun.  He hopes it’s unconsciously.  He _knows_ , as surely as he knows his name, that she wouldn’t draw on an unarmed civilian.  Unless… unless she thought he would try to stop her leaving.  She knows he can take her in a fight.  She doesn’t, right now, have any good reason to believe that he’d fall on the bright side of that line.  This isn’t a conversation he wanted to have, but it’s been thrust upon him and there’s nowhere to go but forward.  At least, if he wants there to be any hope at all that there will, eventually, be something more between them.  She’s stripped the scales from his eyes and shown him his own behaviour from the standpoint of someone who unpicks lies for a living.  He doesn’t like it one bit.  The more so, because it’s true that he’d manipulated events.  He’d even been proud of that, till ten minutes ago.

“No.  But I’m asking you _please_ to hear me out first.”  Her hand moves away from the holster at his automatic, instant answer.  He’s not, idiotic focus on irrelevant details, even sure she knew it was there in the first place.   She slashes a _get-on-with-it-then_ gesture in the space between them.

“The cards… that was damn stupid.  I’m sorry.  I’m really sorry.  I never thought you’d take it like that.  I never meant that.  Never.  I didn’t ever think that you’d behave like that.  But it was stupid, not deliberate.  You’d never do anything like that.  You’ve too much integrity.”  He’s desperate to convince her.  She mustn’t believe that.  It’s _not true_ and he has to make her change her mind. But right now she’s looking as if he’s another sleazebag that Vice have picked up.  He deserves it.

He needs to deal with everything, now, and hope there is still something left when he’s finished.

“I did push my way into the precinct, after Tisdale.  And I can’t say it was just about the writing.  But you knew that.  All the way in, you knew that.”  She nods, once, sharply, as if he’s a suspect confirming something she’d already known.  “The dress … wasn’t manipulating you.  It was just so perfect for you I couldn’t resist.”  Another look of disbelief, another _get-on-with-it_ gesture.

“I came by the precinct last night.”  Another sharp nod, conveying only that she’s hearing him, not assent.  That’s right.  He’d thrown at her that he’d known that she was sleeping on the break-room couch.  “To apologise.  I shouldn’t have lost my temper yesterday.  But…”  he trails off, unsure where to go with that sentence.  Beckett just waits, though her stance has lost the edge of contempt.  Still, it’s not a posture that he could describe as softer, either.  She’s completely shielded: he can’t read her at all.  The silence opens up in front of him.  “I shouldn’t have.  But it was a mistake, not me trying to push you into a relationship you don’t want.”  He stops again.  “I’ve never in my life forced someone into a relationship they don’t want, or paid for sex, and I’m not starting now.”  His sincerity and pain are palpable, and for the first time Beckett looks as if she might agree with something he’s said. 

“And then I was mad that you thought that I was trying to confuse you, and that you thought I’d ever believe you were interested in my money.”  He’s skirting an extremely steep cliff edge.  It’s the truth.  It’s nothing but the truth.  It’s anything but the whole truth.  He was mad because he wants so much more from her.  With her.

“You were pushing me, Castle.  Not, perhaps, to bed.  I don’t think you’d do that.  But you were certainly trying to push me into coming here when I wasn’t happy about it.”  She’s holding on to her composure by a single hair.

He looks sickened.  He hadn’t appreciated how strongly she might feel about simply coming to the loft.  He thinks, horrified, that in fact he’s come far too close to being that man, and hadn’t even seen it.  He really had not appreciated that – in her eyes – insisting she answered his questions at his loft carried a threat.  But of course – in her eyes – it did.   _He_ knows he’d never have sicced Montgomery on her.  She did not.  Nausea roils in his gut.  He’d wanted her, and while he’d never have touched her without her consent, he’d been prepared to override what she wanted to get her here in the hope she’d change her mind.  He’d have hoped to change her mind.  Which with hindsight and her blunt words looks almost as bad as forcing kisses on her after she’d said no, in the hope that she’d respond anyway.

“You need to stop pushing me, Castle.  This is not a good area for any confusion about your motives.  I can see that you didn’t realise what this all looks like; that you never meant it the way it appears.”  She pauses, to see if he’ll say anything more.  His face is sickly white.  When he doesn’t speak, she carries on.  “I’m not a child, an idiot, or one of your bimbette fans.  Don’t treat me like one again.  I can manage my life without you trying to interfere or play the big strong he-man looking after some little woman.  Capisce?”

It’s Castle’s turn to nod.  Message received, very loud and clear.  He steps away from the door.  He’s sufficiently appalled by his own behaviour that he doesn’t even want to ask her to stay.   And she doesn’t.

He’s left alone in his study with the box containing the only gift he’s ever given her and a sick feeling of self-loathing.

* * *

 

He’d made the only point that can possibly, eventually, mend matters, thinks Beckett: that he hadn’t _intended_ to treat her like a streetwalker, or to force a relationship.  She thinks he now understands that he needs to stop pushing her, too. 

She gets into her car and simply leans on the wheel for a while, still so very, very hurt, still angry, still very disturbed by his actions, and how he seemed to have thought of her.  Just another conquest, to be conquered in any way that works.  Remorse and apologies don’t solve everything in two minutes, however obviously sincere, and she’s not inclined to forgive him right now.  It all hurts far, far too much.  She needs time to process, to calm down, to stand back and try to understand the situation.  But right now she can’t see past the last hour.

She starts the engine to go home, but then thinks that if she goes home she’ll just circle fruitlessly round her apartment and not sleep anyway.  Automatically, she aims for the precinct and the subsuming, all-consuming presence of the case, using the dead to make her forget, for now, the fight they’ve just had; the slashing pain in her chest and the tears pooling behind her eyes.  She won’t cry.  Big girls don’t cry.

Much later, staring at the few facts on her board, nothing occurring to her that might help the case, she looks at her watch and realises that it’s crunch time: time to go home, if she’s going; time to try to sleep, if she can do that.  If not, she supposes, she can read, or watch a movie.  Anything not to think.  

But thoughts come, regardless of her wishes.  She’s far more upset than she ought to be.  She can’t deal with this sensibly.  It’s too intense, it’s too charged, it’s too fast.  She feels that she’s being swept downstream: that she’s white-water kayaking without even being able to swim.  Slushy romance novels think that being swept off one’s feet is infinitely desirable.  Beckett thinks that’s insane.  She just wants everything to be… well, what?  Slower.  That’s what.  Less complicated.

She circles round the same useless thinking that she’s been circling round since they first fell into bed.  It still isn’t getting her anywhere, because she’s still fundamentally failing to be honest even with herself: she’s still fundamentally failing to realise that she isn’t being honest with herself.  She wants him, but she doesn’t want to need him; she wants the hot sex, but, she tells herself, not the warm intimacy.  And as a result she is quite frankly terrified by her impulses to tell him her story, and worse, to lean on him for comfort; she’s scared that she’s starting to look for him in the precinct, that she’s so comfortable with matching wits and theory; she’s scared that he’s worming his way into her life, not just her bed.  She doesn’t want to admit that she doesn’t want this to fall apart, that she doesn’t want him to be gone, that she wants more.  Her history and her profession do not incline her to trust the tornado of explosive desire that’s storming around her.  It’s a wild ride while it lasts, but tornadoes blow themselves out, soon enough, leaving disaster strewn widely in their wake.  Safer to keep your storm shelter well-stocked and impregnable.

Yet again, she’s reverting to her ingrained habits of self-protection, that have only brought her to a solitary, close to friendless, life spent largely at work.  Keep it cool, keep it compartmentalised, don’t get involved, don’t talk.   Keep one foot very firmly out the door; keep a barrier between yourself and others.  That way, you can’t get hurt.

If she were thinking clearly, or indeed thinking at all, she’d realise that she’s already getting hurt: that this whole two day fight, and the current lacerating pain, has been caused because he’s able to hurt her without even trying.  Every time they fight, every time he’s been thoughtless, every time she lashes out or he hits out and she bites back; her anger’s driven by hurt.  If she were thinking, she’d know that her actions and statements over the last two days have been driven by a poisonous combination of her own genuine upset and an unacknowledged and unworthy desire to make him hurt at least as much as he’s hurt her.  But recognising that would mean having to recognise that he already means much, much more to her than just a really good lay.

She’d rather stick to her comforting lies and the comforting crudity.  That way she can stick to her sterile, solitary life, and never take another risk.

* * *

 

Back at his loft, Castle is still staring vacantly at the box, not really seeing it at all.  He’d been so proud of himself: that despite all his power and riches and influence he’d _never, ever_ forced anyone to do anything that they’d not wanted to.  Never.  He’s never treated any woman as if she were a streetwalker: he’s never paid for it.  He’d just wanted her to win, be in a good mood, and stay.  He’d never thought that it could be seen as Beckett had interpreted it.  It just hadn’t ever occurred to him.  And now Beckett had forced him to look at that, and how he’s been behaving for the last two months, and shown him that however much integrity he thought he’d displayed, he’s been just as bad as any kerb-crawler, as bad as that other man. 

He’s used influence to follow her around, when she hadn’t wanted him to; he’s played her quite, quite deliberately to provoke the actions and reactions he’d wanted; and although at every stage she’s wanted him in bed, in the last couple of days he’s used her boss as the unspoken force to make her co-operate.  Not overtly.  He’d have realised what he was doing if he’d had to lay it out in plain words.  Wouldn’t he?  But he’d wanted her here, where she would have been surrounded by him and they’d have got caught up in the conversation and she’d have forgotten that she hadn’t wanted to come here and… and he’d have manipulated the evening so that they ended up in bed by mutual agreement.  But it wouldn’t have been, would it?  Because whether she agreed by then or not, she hadn’t wanted to agree to the first step: coming here.  But she’d have felt she had no choice because Montgomery had ordered her to let him, Castle, follow her around and had then reinforced that she had to answer him only two days ago.

Oh fuck.  No wonder she was so angry in the car.  He’d backed her right into a corner without even noticing.  The stone of self-loathing grows.  He doesn’t _do_ this.  He doesn’t.  He’s let his overwhelming, obsessive desire for her make him into someone he never wanted to be, someone he’d hate if he met them.  He’s become someone he doesn’t like at all.

He has to give her space, stop pushing her, let her set the pace.  And if she doesn’t want to come to his home – then however much he wants her here, he needs to let her be.  Because he can’t face himself in the mirror if he doesn’t live up to the one ideal that’s defined his life: that he never, _ever_ , forces anyone into something they don’t want.  Which means not just sexually, but anything.

He looks at the box again.  He’d wanted her to accept his gift, and him.  Instead she’s handed him his raw and bleeding misconceptions; a lesson delivered as harshly as any 18th century ship’s mate would have delivered a flogging.  Not that he’d have understood anything less.  He takes the box into his bedroom and slides it under the bed, where it can’t be seen.  This is not a matter he wishes to discuss with his family.  It’s not a matter he wishes to discuss at all.  It’s a permanent scar, as visible to him as if it had been tattooed on his skin.

He goes back to the study, flips up the lip of his laptop and opens a blank page.  Just as when he was starting out, another new boy in another school, dealing with another round of change, he needs to write, to pour on to the page what he can’t explain in his head.  _Words_ , he thinks, as the song plays through his mind, _it’s only words, and words are all I have._   He doesn’t cry.  He’s not that sort of man.  He hasn’t ever been that sort of man.  ( _Don’t cry, Ricky.  Big boys don’t cry_.)  He’ll just have to deal with the pain.  And knowing he’s brought it on himself really does not make it any better.

Some long time later, he’s spilt his feelings over several pages, without noticeably soothing his scarified soul.  No-one’s disturbed him, for which he is grateful.  Even Alexis couldn’t salve these wounds.  But with his writing, he’s cleared his mind; the scabs of self-delusion have been ripped off.  He can be a better man than he has been: he will be that better man.  He not just wants, now, but needs, to live up to the ideals he thought he had respected.  He’ll apply that same ferocious focus that he’d applied to becoming a success, rich, famous, popular; that he’s used to protect his family from ill-intent: he’ll use that to become the man of integrity that suddenly he realises he hasn’t really been, once he gets to the other side of his own front door.

He can be more than the slick, shallow, selfish playboy that the world knows.  Starting here and now.  And the first step he needs to take, painful as it might be, is to apologise very sincerely to Beckett, without having any ulterior motives or reservations.

Decision made, he considers his options for apologising.  Waiting will only allow this whole situation to fester and get worse, if that is even possible.  He’s not sure it can.  She thinks that he regards her as a bimbo or a prostitute.  It doesn’t get worse.  How did this go so wrong, so fast?

He has to do it in person.  A text is crass, phone little better.  He knows it has to be in person.  But going after her tonight feels far too much like pushing, again.  The precinct has too many interested ears.  He has to get her – no.  _Ask_ her – to meet him somewhere quiet.  Somewhere neutral.  Certainly not at either apartment.  And it needs to be done before tomorrow’s poker game, because otherwise the entire gang will notice, and the last thing that either of them need is Montgomery asking questions.

So.  Turn up at the precinct, hope no-one takes a swing or a shot before he can get a word out, and try his very hardest to mend this mess.

He sits alone as the night draws in, and wonders where he’d gone so badly wrong, when it had all seemed to be starting to go right.


	39. You don't know what it means to me

Beckett had gone home, if only because her bed is more comfortable than the break room couch and she doesn’t have another change of clothes in her locker.  She’ll need to replace those.  She’s barely slept, woken late with her eyes heavy and her head dully aching; still feeling the gut-shot agony that had arisen from Castle’s admissions; still angry despite his attempts to mend matters.  Her hot shower doesn’t deal with the cold void in her stomach, and it takes her longer than usual to be ready for work.  The intellectual knowledge, arriving with the morning, that he’d never meant any of it the way she’d accused him of meaning it doesn’t ameliorate the emotional pain it had caused.  She’s still far too hurt to forgive easily, or to replace emotion with reality.

He’s inadvertently confirmed all her insecurities: that he was just in it for the challenge, for the sex, because she’d said no, and no-one had said no to him before.  Nothing to do with her detecting skills at all.  She’d really thought that he had started to see her differently: that he’d seen past the looks (might as well be honest) to her detective abilities.  Well, clearly not.  He’d only been interested in the sex, and she’d gone along with that because it was just so good she couldn’t resist and because she’d started to think he had much more to him than the guys who’d thought she was just another _hot babe_ who shouldn’t be on the force and had lied and patronised and patted her on the head so that she’d locked herself down and worked her ass off and proved that she was the best damn detective in the Twelfth.  But no.  She’d just been another conquest to be won, and he’d used whatever techniques he’d thought would work.  He’d just pretended to follow her around for the cases, just pretended to be impressed by how she worked.  Just another lie.

She doesn’t think about why, if that were the case, there’s been more than one encounter; why each time it’s got hotter; he’s been more possessive; why he’s still coming to the precinct when by now he knows more than enough to finish any number of books.

She layers on control and indifference with her make-up and her professional dress and takes extra care to conceal the circles beneath her eyes.  She doesn’t need sympathy.  She just needs to stop caring.   

When she reaches the precinct she is appalled to see Castle at her desk – in her chair – reading through the Wax papers.  He jumps out it when she says _Good morning_ as neutrally as she can manage.  It’s no part of her image to have another devastating argument in the bullpen.  Anyway, she doesn’t care.  She doesn’t care if he’s here or not and, contrarily, frankly she’d rather it was _not_.  The void in her stomach expands.  She needs to concentrate on the case.  She summons cool professionalism and ten years of experience and listens to Castle as if he were a witness rather than the man who’s wounded her so badly.  It appears that he’s done something useful: the tell-all book was about to be ditched but their victim’s death has re-invigorated it.  Wax has a motive.  That’s good.  Really.  Anything that solves this case faster and gets her out of his presence is good.  And then her phone rings and gives her an excuse not to talk to Castle again.  Another lead.  Another potential suspect, who’s lied about his now-shattered alibi.  She orders him to be brought in.  That’ll take a couple of hours, and now she needs to find a way to stay calm, cool and professional.  Or go and hide in the restrooms.

Which of course is when Castle opens his big mouth.

“Beckett?”  He’s trying to get her attention.  “Beckett, please?”

“What?”   It’s wholly discouraging.  She’s unhappy enough without adding another difficult, illusion-shattering discussion.

“C’n I talk to you?  Not here.”   She looks at him bleakly.

“Why?” 

“I need to talk to you.  Please.  Please just come out for ten minutes and let me talk to you.”

It’s clear that he is desperate to talk – though he is _asking_ , and there’s nothing in his quiet, unhappy voice to indicate that he expects any sort of positive answer.  Better to deal with this now, than let it suppurate all day.

“Okay.”

In the elevator she stands on one side, Castle on the other, the gap between them not only physical.  Neither says a word, and the silence is fraught with tension and pain.  He’s very careful to give her space, she notices.  Very careful to avoid contact with her.  His large frame is somehow slumped, defeated, desolate.

He stands back and lets her precede him from the elevator, out of the door.  He doesn’t attempt to steer her or touch her.  She doesn’t look at him when she speaks, the chitin of indifference layered thickly over her.

“I’m here.  Say what you have to.”  And in her cool voice he hears the undercurrents of anger and an enormous amount of hurt from the previous night; the riptide of suppressed misery.  He looks straight at her, so she can see his sincerity.

“I’m sorry.”  She stands stock still in the street.  “I’m really sorry.  I didn’t realise what I was doing.  I was wrong.”  He swallows, hard.  The next bit is choked out.  “If you want me to stop shadowing you, I will.  I’ll leave, right now, and not come back.”  It’s the only thing he can think of that could possibly show her how much he means this; the only offering to make.  Atonement requires sacrifice.  His own self-respect requires him to do this.  There’s a flash of unidentifiable emotion through her eyes, gone too quickly to catch hold of, as her head whips up and her green gaze meets his.  In an instant, as she doesn’t speak, the whole of his earth becomes without form, and void.  The silence lengthens, and he starts to turn away, defeated and lost.  He’d played to win, and lost in spades, and now she’s denying him a rematch.

She can’t think that she’s heard him correctly: plays his words back again, and again, running it through her head.  He’s offering her exactly what she’s told herself she’s wanted since the first day he appeared: presenting her with the silver salver carrying the opportunity to take her previous life back.  She can go right back to how it – she – used to be: peaceful, quiet, professional, controlled.

Alone.

She realises, a rush of drowning horror flooding her chest and constricting her breathing, that she doesn’t want that.  She’s being given exactly what she thought she wanted and now she’s found that it isn’t what she actually wants at all. He’s irritating and annoying and a nuisance – but she’s a better cop with him there; when she can think against another intellect: like two hands pushing against each other, fingers twined, strengthening each arm.  She doesn’t want him gone.  And if he’s offered to leave, if he’s prepared to walk away – then maybe she wasn’t wrong about him. 

“No…”  He flicks back round, head coming up, shoulders straightening; terrifying, astonishing, hope on his face. 

“No?”  He can’t believe he heard her, so faintly breathed out was her single word; desperation for it to be real hammering through his veins and fibrillating his heart.  “Not leave?”  _And there was light_. 

She chews her lip indecisively, as if her answer had sneaked out without permission.  Darkness slides over the face of his hope.  He says nothing, doesn’t move.  _No pushing.  It has to be up to her._   Full minutes pass, during which he remains motionless, a safe distance from her.  Out of reach.  She, out of his reach, to be precise.  It would be so _easy_ to screw this up again, by touching her.  She needs to come to him: not, this time, born of arrogance that she won’t be able to resist him, but because that’s the only way, now, that he can ever be sure that she wants him; if she comes of her own volition.

But he wants to touch her.  Take her in his arms and win her forgiveness and hold her and kiss her and… more.  Except that he did that already and that’s why he’s in this whole messed-up situation.  Because he _wanted._   He’d _wanted_ and his urge just to _take_ what he wanted (just to _take_ ) had defined everything he’d done to get to Beckett.  Hell, what a mess he’s made.

“Don’t leave.”  She’s stopped chewing her lip.  It’s her normal decisive snap.  “I have to get back.”  She makes for the entryway.

“Beckett?”  She pauses, looks him over suspiciously.  Not, now, with contempt.  It’s a considerable improvement from ten minutes ago.  It does not, however, encompass the elements of liking that had crept in over the last two weeks or so, since he’d saved her life.  Not wholly forgiven.  By no means wholly forgiven.  Yet.  He has to believe it’s _yet_.

“Yeah?”  He thinks about asking _Why?_ , but that is pretty much guaranteed to start another fight, or to trigger her flight reflex whenever she says something revealing.  He’ll find out why, in due time.

“You want some coffee?”  He gestures at the coffee bar down the street.

“ ‘Kay.  Please.”  She’s inside before he can ask how she likes it.  Which he finds is not a helpful thought, phrased in that way.  Latte.  He knows that much.  A peace offering. 

He doesn’t have to leave the precinct.  He can stay.  At the precinct.  Ah.  He can, he supposes, always sit there and dream.  Half a loaf, and all that.  Maybe if he’s useful, eventually…

But it still hurts.  Half isn’t enough, now he knows what the whole can be.  He trudges off to get coffee, remembering that there’s a poker game tonight; that Beckett will be there, in his loft, and that he will be able to do absolutely nothing about it.

Beckett’s back to glaring at the murder board, when he returns, long enough later to have taken time to regain his composure, with two coffees.  He presents her with the latte, still extraordinarily careful not to touch her.  She’s almost finished it, using it to cover the fact that she’s still barely exchanging words with him – he does not understand this: he thought she’d (somewhat) forgiven him, but she’s not speaking – when Esposito struts over.

“Yo, Beckett.”

“Yeah?”

“Suspect in Interrogation.”

“Okay.  Castle” – she turns to him – “stay in Observation.  I don’t want you in there this time.”  That hurts, too, though there’s no edge to her words.  Esposito gives Castle a quick, assessing, and fortunately unnoticed by Beckett, glance; spots the slight flicker of hurt.

“She’s wired, bro.  She’s been winding up for this for the last half hour.”  Castle nods, silence now partially explained.  “Better that you’re not in there.  She does these alone, always.  Doesn’t even take me or Ryan in.  She builds an atmosphere – scumbags fall right into it and spill their guts.  Seen it a lot, when it’s been a bad case: must be all that annoyance when nothin’s poppin’.  Just watch.  Trust me, bro, it’ll be worth it.”

So he goes to watch, just like Espo had said.  He watches with a writer’s eye for observation, filing every detail in his capacious memory.  He can almost see the web being spun, the steel wires of tension wrapping round the suspect, till he’s sweating and terrified and Beckett could probably tell him to commit suicide and he’d do it, just to be out of that room and away from her.  She’s formidable, and fearsome.  And the suspect spills every last iota of information including some he probably didn’t even know he had.  Oh – and he saw the likely killer, and it was a woman.  That means it must have been Wax.  Castle forgets himself and bangs on the one-way glass, till Beckett turns, glares and makes a slashing _shut-up_ gesture.

He returns to observing.  Beckett’s at full force, and it has much the same effect on the suspect – and he is, still, a suspect – as a pile-driver on an egg.  She blazes, and Castle burns in the heat.  He becomes aware that he’s uncomfortably aroused: that watching this ferocious, focused Beckett takes him back to the very first days when all he knew was that she was hot and _interesting_ , when he hadn’t been interested in anything for months.  Now he knows her, in so many ways, and she’s still the hottest woman he’s ever met and she’s become more and more interesting with every day that passes.  He wants her back; wants her for the longer term; wants her to want him for more than occasional release and physical relief. 

And right now he hasn’t got a clue how to make that happen.  Well.  That’s not true.  He does.  It involves waiting for her to forgive him.  Patience, unless he’s in control of the hunt, is not a virtue he normally practises, nor that he appreciates.  It’s all he’s got, though.

When the interview is wrapped Beckett orders Wax to be picked up.  When she’s finished, she’s in a slightly better mood, though all that that means is that she’s concealing herself under reserve and coolness as opposed to displaying the crackling aura of detestation that had suffused the last couple of days.  It spreads to the team: Ryan and Esposito noticeably relax from their combat-ready tension, though neither of them dares to start ragging Beckett.

“Beckett?”

“What is it, Ryan?”

“ ‘S lunch time.”  She looks up, clearly surprised that it’s got to be lunch time without her noticing.  “We’re” – his sweep of the hand encompasses Esposito, Castle and himself – “going out to pick up lunch.  You coming?”

“Nah.  Could you bring me back a sandwich and a soda, please?”

“Sure.”  She hands over some cash and returns to the papers on her desk, trying to see through the results of the last interview.  She doesn’t really think he did it, though it can’t be wholly discounted: but he hadn’t behaved in a way that indicates it’s likely.  But despite the evidence piling up, she isn’t yet convinced that Wax is in the frame either.  She hadn’t come off with the right tells and reactions.  Still, sweat her this afternoon and see what leaks out.  She concentrates very fiercely on the case and does not allow a single thought about why she’d let Castle stay to enter her mind.  She knows why.  It’s because it allows her to solve murder faster, better, sooner.  Like taking steroids, for her detective abilities. That’s all.  And to do that, she needs to play her part in resuming their working relationship.  Her conscience has been biting at her since he apologised.  She _never_ behaves like that.  She just doesn’t.  She doesn’t scream like a fishwife or lose her temper or throw out eviscerating accusations.   She just walks away.

She entirely fails to ask herself why that might be.

Lunch returns and Beckett eats it without noticing, rehearsing scenarios and questions for Wax, trying to weave each thread into a coherent line of interrogation.  She can sense the case accelerating towards conclusion: only another few steps will clear this up.  She just can’t – yet – see how, or who.  As she considers, she realises that this time, unforgiven though he may be, it will be psychologically useful to have Castle in the room.  Wax likes him, and she’ll show off in front of him.  After all, a second-rate true crime writer will always want to impress a mega-star, and given that she’s clearly attracted to him that will help.

“Castle.”

“Mmmm?”

“Castle, you’re coming into Interrogation with me.”  He starts.

“Huh?”  His overactive imagination and earlier arousal combine, and Beckett spots the flash of heat through his eyes.  The answering flush through her blood is _not_ required. 

“To interview Lee Wax.  She’ll be here any moment.  I want you to stand away from where I’m sitting, lean on the wall, and don’t interfere.”  She knows that’s a hopeless statement, but she needs to try.  She just needs him in the room, so that Wax’s attention is split.

“Why?”  Castle’s sure that there’s a reason behind this.

“Without feeding your oversized ego,” - ow, that was not kind – “it wasn’t difficult to spot her eyeing you up, last time.  I want her distracted so I can read her when she’s off guard.  And she’s stupid enough to think she can try to impress you” – there’s a heavy frosting of _God-knows-why_ on that statement; just like there usually would be – “so she might say more than she means.  Got it?”  Castle smiles, for almost the first time today.  He’s being useful.

“Got it.”  He grins suddenly.  “Are you admitting I might be a distraction to women?”

“Only those with an IQ lower than their bra size.”  There are still a lot of sharp, unfriendly edges in that comment.  Sniggers from behind him indicate that the boys have been listening closely.  He retires before he says something that will damage this tentative truce; this tiny step towards détente.  A small tendril of hope curls around his heart.

Beckett’s strategy works quite well initially, but Wax’s sense of self-preservation is clearly only secondary to that of a trapped sewer rat, and when it dawns on her that she’s being sized up as the killer Castle is no distraction at all, even when he throws in some serious barbs.  However, the shock of being accused leads her to talk and although she has an unimpeachable alibi (what a shame) it’s extremely peculiar that a tell-all absolution story did not include the victim’s charitable donations to the Captain she injured so badly.  Hm.  It’s becoming increasingly likely that she didn’t make them. 

After interrogation Beckett’s conscience starts to nag at her more strongly.  She’d managed to ignore it in the pressure of Interrogation, but now that that’s a bust she knows that she has to say something before she starts on the next piece of the jigsaw.  Because he offered to walk away, and she just cannot understand why he would have done that at all if he thought of her as she’d believed overnight.

“Castle?”  Beckett sounds extraordinarily uncertain.  Castle looks at her keenly.  She’s abusing her lip again.  Whatever she’s about to say, it doesn’t look like she’s enjoying the thought of it.  “I’m,” she swallows, and starts again, “I’m-sorry-for-what-I-said-last-night.”  There’s an astonished pause.  “I-know-you-didn’t-mean-that.”  He’s still opening and shutting his mouth without finding any suitable words arriving in it when he realises she’s fled.  Well.  Well now.  That was unexpected.  Deserved – she’s by no means guiltless in all this mess, and his apology had at least as much to do with regaining his _own_ self-respect as with her – but very, very unexpected.  A bit like being allowed to stay, really.  He’d have thought she’d prefer to burn herself alive than apologise to him.

He’s still thinking variants on _Well that was very, very interesting_ when Beckett re-appears in a reasonable facsimile of her normal mood.  There’s still discomfort between them, and it doesn’t exactly feel fixed, but it’s better.

The remains of the afternoon and early into the evening pass as they run the financials again, still not finding cash leaving the victim’s accounts for the disabled Captain.  They’re still discussing, almost normally, that if you give that sort of money, you’d want it to be known about, and concluding that it is now almost certain that therefore she didn’t give it, when Montgomery exits his office with his jacket on, smiling happily.

“Beckett, Castle.”

“Sir.”

“Yeah?”

“Isn’t there a poker game tonight?”  Castle looks at his watch.  Oops.

“Yes.”  A flurry of activity results.

“Beckett, I thought you were in tonight.”  Beckett flicks a very irritated glance at Castle.  She’d intended to arrive separately.

“Yes sir.”

“Come on then.  We’ll all go together.”  That is not what Beckett needs.  Sharing a cab – she’s not driving, there’s bound to be alcohol and she certainly needs a drink now – with Castle was not on the cards.  She wants some space.  But Montgomery’s regarding her with a very knowing look and she doesn’t bring her personal affairs ( _very poor word choice there, Kate_ ) to the precinct.

“Okay,” she answers calmly, snags her jacket and precedes the two men to the elevator and out with a reasonable facsimile of her normal swinging stride, though Montgomery notes with some small intrigue that there’s a grace note of irritation in the click of her heels.  He also notes, with considerably more interest, that Castle’s more subdued than usual.  He hasn’t missed the angry atmosphere around the bullpen over the last day or two, either.  Ever since the previous poker game, in fact.  Hmm.  He likes his solve rate, which is massively boosted by the performance of Beckett’s team, and has only improved since Castle arrived.  He likes Castle, despite his strong suspicion that Castle’s main motive for following Beckett around had nothing to do with his books or her work.  He also suspects very strongly that Castle has much more to him than any of them would have expected.  But he regards Beckett with a paternal feeling that she would hate if she knew about it, and he knows that she needs to slow down or she’ll burn out.  And since Castle’s been around, she’s – mainly – been less driven and is obviously – mostly – having more fun.  His conclusion to all of this is that Castle should be kept around, in which case the next step is to make sure that Beckett knows that he, Montgomery, hasn’t missed the undercurrents. 

“Case going well, Beckett?”

“Better, sir.  Eliminating suspects, though I haven’t found a real lead to who actually did it.”  Montgomery smiles.

“Good.  It seemed to be getting a bit on top of you, yesterday.  You shouldn’t let things get to you like that.”  Beckett parses that sentence.  She’s perfectly certain Montgomery is meaning more than he’s saying.

“No sir.  I was just frustrated with the lack of progress.”  Straight hit back, with no underlying subtexts.  Montgomery internally admires the strike.

“Glad to hear it.  Just take care that you don’t get sucked in.  Take some down time if you need it.”

“Sir.”

Castle listens with interest.  He’s fairly sure that Montgomery is handing Beckett a message.  Whether Beckett is accepting it – is doubtful.

Conversation turns to other matters: local politics, baseball, Broadway.  Montgomery is quietly satisfied that Beckett’s got his point.  He’s also satisfied that whatever had been wrong yesterday, it’s mostly mended.  He doesn’t at all believe it was only about the case.  Still, he doesn’t need to say anything more.


	40. Turning tables on me

Castle ushers Montgomery and Beckett in, careful to preserve a continuing discreet distance between himself and a still heavily reserved, though pleasantly civil, Beckett.  It seems he’s beaten the rest of the gang here, fortunately.  His mother, lounging on the couch in a spectacularly luminous outfit, has done quite enough damage in the last couple of days without letting her loose on the cops and the judges and the political establishment.  He remembers the look in her eye when he’d challenged her.  The subsequent appalling row with Beckett had put it out his mind, but now that he’s recalled it he thinks that he ought to try to chase it down.  The last thing he needs is his mother having a plan, about anything.  He sweeps Beckett and Montgomery through to his study and rapidly turns it into a poker room.  Shortly everyone’s arrived, and the games begin.

Much to Castle’s surprise – but not to Roy Montgomery’s – Beckett ends up sitting next to him.  He’s sure he didn’t arrange that, and he’s very sure Beckett didn’t, from the slightly confused look in her eye.  Well, he didn’t ask for it, and he didn’t manipulate events to get it, but if it’s happened he’s not going to refuse it.

Most of the way through the evening matters are progressing very much like the previous game.  Beckett and Castle are cleaning the clocks of the other three.  Conversation, carefully directed that way by Montgomery, who wants very badly to see how Castle and Beckett interact today so that he knows how to manage his precinct tomorrow, turns to the current gruesome case.  The assembled company is only too happy to speculate and theorise, except Beckett, who would rather forget the still-vivid image of the victim’s swollen, drowned face.  Still, as the men keep chattering, their enthusiasm is quite fetching.  A bit like a group of children visiting the monkey enclosure at the zoo, really.  If only she could decide which side of the wire this bunch should be.  While they throw out ever more interesting suggestions, the game heats up, and the pot gets bigger.  First Montgomery folds, then the judge, then the Mayor.  And suddenly, Beckett realises, it’s just Castle and she, and he’s even quoting back the words from the other night.  Group opinion is right behind her, and she’s got the hand to take him down.  The Ferragamos whisper enticingly to her.  There’s a _lot_ of money on the table.

And then it comes to her.  Don’t win.  Deliberately don’t win, and leave her hand face down.  Insatiable curiosity will compel him to look, and then he’ll know _exactly_ how it feels to be patronised and humiliated.  Yes.  Sauce for the gander.  She’s still more than a little angry, even if she’s apologised, and she wants vengeful satisfaction far more than she wants another pair of _take-me-if-you-dare_ shoes.  Even if they would drive men (one man) wild.

She folds.

The other men are very disappointed.  Castle plays up to it, deliberately and childishly triumphant, and getting razzed for it in a way he clearly expects.  Until the Mayor says, quite accidentally, “Well, it's not your fault, Detective. No matter how down he gets, he always manages to rise from the dead,” and Castle’s eyes grow wide.

“Oh, now, that would be a twist.” 

And suddenly there’s a real, live, theory to be chased.  Even if it’s insanely unlikely, Beckett can’t wait to leave.  She’s itching to get to the precinct, to feed her evidence into the maw of this idea and see what that digestion brings: to start to plan out the areas to search, the threads to tug on.  She just about manages to say goodnight politely to the city’s luminaries before she’s frantically looking for her jacket.  Not that she’ll give Castle the satisfaction of knowing that she might actually pay some – any – attention to this craziness.  Oh no.  She doesn’t want him distracting her from anything that might solve this case, and the only way to do that is to make it blindingly clear that she thinks this is nonsense.  Which is easy, because she does.  She just has to prove it.

“She’s dead, you know.”

“But if she isn’t?”

“That’s insane.  You don’t survive explosions like that.  If there’d been any chance she was alive the FBI would have found her.  It’s not even worth a hospital search.”

Castle looks slightly disappointed.

“Thanks for the game.  Night.” 

He hadn’t expected her to stay.  But it still hurts that she’s so eager to leave.  He desultorily turns over each hand.  Montgomery – a pair of twos and nothing else.  No wonder he was out so fast.  The Mayor, a bit better, three tens, Judge Markway nothing: he always tries to bluff to start with.  He’d had three kings.  He flips over Beckett’s hand and gasps.  She’d had a straight flush.  And she’d folded…  Abruptly he realises why she’d been so angry when he’d folded on a winning hand.  He feels completely humiliated.  She’d _let_ him win.  It feels horrible.  He’s taken her money, which he certainly doesn’t need, under false pretences.  Ow, ow, ow.  As an object lesson, it could barely be bettered, unless she’d revealed it to the assembled group.  He can’t even complain, because all she’s done is _exactly_ what he’d done, and he will take anyone’s bet that _she_ didn’t want to keep him happy so she could get him into bed tonight.  It’s just so brilliantly Beckett that he can’t even get angry.  But he can reprise her actions.  He’ll give her these winnings back, and then they’ll have a clean start – and a rematch.  Because he thinks she might just be as good at poker as he is, and now he wants a fair chance to find out.  And maybe if they can have a fair rematch, they can start again on a clean slate.  He shuffles the cards together and wanders out his study.

* * *

 

Beckett’s gone straight to the precinct, fired by successful revenge and a driving need to follow the thread that’s just been identified.  Just for a little while, to work out what needs to be done tomorrow.  Just for a while, to give herself something to think about that isn’t the prickling knowledge that she was half-tempted to ask Castle to come with her, and almost wholly tempted to start working it through right there in his loft.   She shakes her head irritably at the murder board, which doesn’t really help.  She’s still not fully forgiven him.  Though… that was an astounding apology.  Really leave?  She pushes the thought away for now, and continues writing out three to-do lists ready for the morning.  By the time she’s finished, it’s just after midnight, and since she still doesn’t have a full change in her locker, she’d better get home.

Home is still, and quiet, and peaceful.  Beckett absently runs her fingers over her Siberian bear on her way to her bedroom; cleans off her make-up and brushes the alcohol and subsequent coffee from her teeth, then slips into her silky, soothingly soft nightwear and her waiting bed.  Her dreams are waiting for her. 

Tonight, though, her dreams have teeth, and sharp edges, and claw into her; slithering from her sheets and prowling her pillows.  She wakes, gasping for air, still seeing dead faces; it takes moments for her to realise where she is, safe in her own bed.  She breathes: in, out, in, out; slow deep breaths to slow her pulse and calm her mind, and when she thinks she can stand without shaking she rises and makes herself a hot drink and pulls a novel from her shelves.  Not, here in the small dark hours with monsters lurking in her bed, a mystery, or a murder, or an emotionally fraught, dark, Russian classic.  Nothing to trigger the dreams of the dead.  Simply a story: easy, undemanding; while she sips hot chocolate and tries to forget.  It’s too late to call Lanie, to talk about nothing in particular, the way they do when either of them finds it all too much, too close; too early to rise for work.

When she returns to her sheets she turns her mind towards the usual resort to keep her mind moving in a direction which she hopes will send her dreams away from nightmares and the dead, into something less disturbing: she deliberately starts to invoke the hot, edgy dreams that haven’t come to her for some days; that she uses to protect herself from the nightmares: the sound and feel without vision that used to fill her nights.  She doesn’t want visions.  She knows what she’ll see, and she tells herself she’s not yet ready to forgive him completely.  Even if she’s perfectly well aware that she’d been unfair in her final accusation, even if he’d apologised in spades, even if she’d apologised.  Even if she’d wanted him there in the precinct with her, ripping through this latest theory.

At first, her dreams are obedient to her will, no sight, just sound and touch: blazing sensation driving the dead to their coffins, cross-chained to prevent them rising again.  She feels the inviting stroke of silk around her wrists; the hard press of fingers and of mouths; the struggle for dominance that she will, and will want to, lose; and finally surrender to the size and the weight and the strength that lets her escape her demons.

But slowly her subconscious takes control: vision returns and the clawing phantoms follow.  Still trapped in silk shackles, the dead creep around her, ever closer – and she wakes again, crying out in shock into the pre-dawn dark and the chill silence around her.  This time she doesn’t try to resist the final route to forgetfulness.  _Make me forget_ , she whispers to the night; calls up the memories and lets her mind slip, lets it take her down into the fire of oblivion.

And he does.

* * *

 

Breakfast over, Alexis left for school, Castle is left with his bleary-eyed mother.  It seems as good a time as any to press her for some answers.  It seems, though, that bleary-eyed does not mean bleary-brained.

“Kiddo, what was going on the night before last?  It sounded like a row with Detective Beckett.”  His mother looks maliciously inquisitive, no longer bleary but beady-eyed.

“Well, Mother,” Castle says bitingly, “since you decided to tell her about the cards, she decided to tell me what she thought of it.”

“Well, that shouldn’t have caused such a row.  She couldn’t have cared less, on the phone.”  His mother’s airy tone, implying that Beckett was wholly indifferent to the whole affair, flicks his temper on to full.  He needs to make his mother understand that she’s done severe damage here.

“Really.  No doubt not caring is why she handed me back her dress, then?”  He hadn’t meant to say that.

His mother looks genuinely shocked.  “She did _what_ , Richard?”

“First she gave back the money, then the dress.”  His mother is silenced.  Castle’s general upset with his mother’s actions spills out.  “She told me she didn’t need charity.”  He stops there, omits the greater part of what Beckett had said, and passes swiftly on to the next part.  “She damn nearly threw me out the precinct, thanks to your efforts to _help_.”

“Mmmm.”  Martha looks marginally discomfited.  “That wasn’t the idea,” she mutters under her breath.  Then she brightens slightly.  “Darling, she didn’t, though.  Have you considered that she wouldn’t have been nearly so angry with you if she didn’t care?  If she was completely indifferent she’d have given you back the money but not the dress.  And she certainly wouldn’t have come to your poker game last night.” 

Castle looks dubiously at his mother.  He’s not nearly as convinced of her Panglossian world-view as she obviously is, much as he’d like to be following Beckett’s apology.  Especially as he knows why Beckett came to the game.  To deliver, stunningly successfully, a searingly direct lesson in how humiliation feels.

“Next time, please don’t interfere.”  He has no hope that she’ll actually listen, but perhaps she’ll stop and think first.  He’s not encouraged when his mother doesn’t answer.  “Mother…?”

“Yes, yes, Richard.”  She sounds distracted.  He’s not surprised when she bustles off. 

Since there’s nothing else to do, and he still thinks that there is a very reasonable possibility that their killer is the resurrected dead terrorist, he departs for the Twelfth to try to convince Ryan and Esposito to support his theory.

Beckett had woken only marginally refreshed, and not particularly happy about the methods she’d had to employ to achieve even that limited result.  All through a hot shower, her favourite moisturiser and the route to work on a not-yet crowded subway; a still small voice is whispering that if she continues to think she’s in this for occasional physical relief, she’s dead wrong.  This is, after all, the second time she’s resorted to explicitly summoning Castle’s image.  And twice, if you count the reality, that he’s been summoned to help her chase away the dead.  She shivers; pushes the thought away, and decides that it’s early enough that she can spend some time in the gym before she starts, beating out her thoughts in the mindless rhythm of strike and recoil.

When Ryan and Esposito get in Beckett’s just coming down the stairs, slightly damp around the edges.  She grins.

“Ready to roll?  Castle’s got a new theory.”  Her voice and the glint in her eye tell them that this one’s a doozy.  “Remember there was a third terrorist, who got blown up on the ship?”  They nod.  “Castle believes she’s still alive.  I don’t.  But it’s the best we’ve got.  I thought we’d get further with Wax.”  She hands out the lists.  “Let’s get going.”

Espo and Ryan look down the extensive lists, depressed.  There’s about a week’s work here, and Beckett will expect it all by lunchtime. 

“When’d she put these together, anyway?” Espo asks, aggrieved.  “We didn’t have this crazy idea yesterday, and it’s not even nine yet.”  Ryan looks mildly confused.

“Dunno.”

“What’s up?” Castle asks from over their shoulders.  “What are those?”

“Lists,” grumps Esposito.  “Lines of enquiry.  Possible leads.  And it’s all your fault ‘cause you’ve had a crazy theory.  I don’t even wanna know how you came up with it.”  Castle corrals them into coffee, even managing to pull Beckett in, and explains. 

“Susan Mailer, alive?” says Ryan, shocked.

“Her body was never found,” Castle ripostes, clearly thinking that this is a killer argument.

“Yeah. Because she was vaporized in the explosion.”  Beckett thinks it’s time to try to introduce some realism.  It may be the only lead they currently have, but everyone’s getting far too excited about the possibility of people rising from the dead – she swallows against the dry-mouthed memory of her nightmares – and committing murder.  The chance of this actually being the break they need is limited.

“Well, maybe she was thrown clear.”  Beckett rolls her eyes and generally manages to make clear that she can’t believe that either.  Fortunately Esposito is also hard-headed and unconvinced.

“Well, then, she would've been badly burned and would've needed care.”

“And no one matching her description ever checked into area hospitals,” Ryan points out.

“Mere details, my good man.”  Castle adopts the plummy accents of an old-fashioned English detective – Alleyn, or Wimsey, perhaps, thinks Beckett, amused at his best efforts to support his crazy theory.  Still, they need to discount it on evidence, not just on the grounds of insanity.

“Um, around here, we call them _facts_.”  Castle looks happily at her.  He clearly knows that they have to follow this up.

“Well then,” he enthuses, “let's go get us some _facts_.”  Beckett rolls her eyes at the boys behind his back.  They give her answering looks of sympathy cut with a heavy layer of amusement.  All of them know that Beckett’s going to have to put up with Castle’s crazy theory all the way to Westchester. 

“Okay, then.  Road trip to Westchester,” she sighs.

Castle, in a moment of severe common sense, has come to the conclusion that taxing Beckett with her behaviour last night is not liable to be well received when they are chasing down a theory.  He’s also come to the conclusion, courtesy of a significant number of backstage encounters with the many uses of make-up, that she hasn’t slept particularly well.  And finally, he is perfectly sure that she went straight from poker to the precinct and spent some time there before – probably – going home.  He doesn’t know how to – or whether to – raise any of that.

He compromises by messing with the radio, fretfully unable to find a station that plays anything he likes for longer than five minutes, until Beckett, having told him three times to quit it with ever increasing annoyance not leavened with amusement in the slightest, takes her eyes off the road for half a second and smacks his hand away as he moves towards the dial again, just as they’re turning off the Parkway.

“Just leave it, Castle,” she snaps.  “Or tune it to 94.5 FM so I have something decent to listen to.  All these stations play vile music.”

“I like classic rock.”

“So do I, but right now I want classical.  And that doesn’t explain why you’ve been through five country stations, six – what was it – oh yes – hot adult contemporary, three Top 40 and even a gospel station.  Stop channel surfing, or you’ll find yourself sitting on the kerb waiting for me to pick you up on the way back.  Got it?”

“Got it.” He pouts, which has no effect at all as Beckett’s only looking at the road, and does what he’s told.  The strains of Saint-Saens’ Danse Macabre pour into the car.

“Change it,” Beckett raps.  “Now.”

“But you said…” Castle splutters.

“Change it.  Anything.  Now!”  Instead he simply switches it off, and looks across.  Beckett’s lips are bloodless where they’re pressed together, and her face pale.  She’s gripping the steering wheel with sharp, white knuckles.

“Okay, what’s that all about?”  Castle’s worried.  Beckett doesn’t say a word.  She pulls over on the next turn off, parks up in the first safe place and gets out the car, walking away for a few strides, into the trees.  He waits a beat, then follows her.

She hates that piece.  She’s never liked it, not since they’d had a rather-too evocative music lesson in junior school; but she’d only grown to hate it after it was played after her mother’s funeral.  She’s never got over that accident of timing: and every time she hears any of its notes it triggers the memory.  Coupled with this particularly nasty case, and last night’s nightmares, it’s all far too much for today.  She just needs a minute to push away the sudden, horrible vision of the dead dancing, with the Devil and his fiddle on their tails; forcing them to dance all night: no rest, no respite.  She breathes deeply, trying to rationalise.  This case has really got her spooked.  She needs a night out with Lanie, to remember what reality feels like, step away from the job.  She leans on a convenient tree for just an instant, letting the surge of terror-fuelled adrenalin drain, steadying her knees and her hands.  Suddenly there’s a hand on her shoulder.

“Hey.  Are you okay?”  It’s a fairly pointless question.  It’s obvious that Beckett’s not okay, suddenly.  He tugs her round, puts his arm round her and pats her back tentatively.  When she doesn’t object and just stands there in the cradle of his body he’s even more worried.  It doesn’t, however, stop him taking advantage of this unconscious acquiescence and holding her a little closer, noting the small lean in.  She _should_ lean on him, on those almost-unheard of occasions when she needs someone.  Even the strongest tower can fall, unbuttressed.

She steps back.  He drops his arms before she can think he’s trying to push her.

“I’m okay.  Just a dizzy moment.  Better to stop the car and take a breath than crash, yeah?”  He knows she’s lying. She knows he knows she’s lying.  But here and now he isn’t going to call it out.  He opts for humour, instead.

“Does that mean I can drive?  If you’re getting dizzy spells, I ought to drive.  It’s not safe.”

“No.”  He pouts at her, trying to raise a smile.  “No, Castle.  You have the concentration span of a butterfly.  I’m not trusting you with my cruiser.”  There’s a feeble effort at a smile, with that.

“I can concentrate.”  She raises a very sceptical eyebrow.  “When I’ve got something worth concentrating on.”  He lets that sink in.  Much to his surprise, Beckett simply hrrumphs at him and leads the way back to the car.  He’d taken a chance in saying that, and he’d half-expected to be shot down in flames.

The radio stays off, though, and there isn’t any conversation, the rest of the way.


	41. A game that I hate to lose

The injured Captain’s family do not seem surprised when Beckett, Castle in tow, shows up on the doorstep to ask about the cheques.  The money had been posted from all over, until quite recently, when postmarks show they’ve all come from Lititz, Pennsylvania.  Which is a three to three and a half hour drive from here which they need to start right now.  Lunch, not for the first time in Beckett’s extensive experience, is looking like a lost cause.

This time she selects a classic rock channel before they move off and instructs Castle that if he touches any single one of the controls or the dashboard or indeed anything at all at any time unless she specifically asks him to she will leave him wherever they are to make his own way home.  Castle notes with some interest that it’s got back almost to the tone of amused, snarky irritation that she normally reserves for him.  Clearly he’s done something right, for a change.  Or there’s something wrong with Beckett.  Maybe she’s getting sick.  Though he doesn’t believe in the dizziness for an instant.  That little episode, put together with the lists the boys had been brandishing, which hadn’t been constructed in ten minutes, and the circles under her eyes, argues for a short, bad night.   The plea for him to make her forget flickers briefly through his mind.

Beckett is part concentrating on the route, which is relatively simple driving and does not, unlike central Manhattan, require her entire brain; part considering whether they’ve really caught a break and they can wrap this case up before she really does get committed to Bellevue, probably by Lanie, or have a screaming breakdown; and part, whenever she can’t stop it wriggling into her head, thinking how reassuring it had felt when Castle had been patting her comfortingly.  It’s not helping her stay mad at him.  In fact, she’s having a very hard time staying mad. 

It is, she realises, more than a little contradictory – not to say stupid - to be trying to stay mad with someone whose image you’ve been using as a Nytol-substitute only last night.  Especially when you’ve made your point.  It is, she further thinks, very odd that Castle hadn’t mentioned it.  Maybe he hadn’t spotted it?  Even if that’s the case, though, _she_ knows that she’d turned the tables, and that’s enough for her to think that they’re pretty much even.  She relaxes.  Things are back on track.  Now she just needs to remember about boundaries.  If she can do that, then there’s no reason not to go back to where they’d been.  _Remember, Kate, he doesn’t want a relationship.  He said so._

“I’m sorry about back there,” she says.  Castle’s head flicks round. 

“For what?”  Beckett shrugs, non-committally.  She really does not want to explain the nightmare, and she certainly isn’t going to explain the trigger of that piece of music.  She’ll talk to Lanie about it.  Lanie knows the story.  A girls’ night.  That’s what she needs.  Wine and food and her friend.  Yes.  Just as soon as this case is over.

“Just… stopping like that.”  Castle thinks that a long road trip ought to be the perfect opportunity for Beckett to talk.  If she ever actually did talk, it would be.  If it were night, and the concealing darkness was in play, it would be.  Neither is the case.  Ergo, talking is unlikely to the point of impossibility.  But he can flirt just a little.

“Feel free to faint dizzily into my arms any time, Detective.”  She makes a very rude noise.  “What?  You can catch me if I faint, too.”  There’s a hint of a smile.  “Thinking of that…”

“What, Castle?”

“Fainting.  It’s often brought on by low blood sugar.”

“And your point is?”

“Low blood sugar caused by not eating regularly.  It’s nearly lunchtime, Beckett.  Aren’t we going to eat?”  He conjures up his best pathetic, puppy-dog eyes, and whines, “I’m hungry.”

“Killers don’t stop for lunch, Castle.”

“Does that mean you don’t either?”  He grins evilly.  “No wonder you’re always so snarky.  You need to eat occasionally.”

“I do eat.”

“When was the last time you ate a proper home-cooked meal?  In fact – can you even cook?”

“Of course I can cook.”  She’s not answering the first question.  She can cook quite well.  She just never has the time, and takeout arrives so much faster.  Castle emits a sceptical grunt, and returns to the instant problem.

“I want lunch, Beckett.  Can we just stop and grab something quickly?”  Beckett sighs.  He’ll just keep nagging till she gives in, won’t he?  There must be a truck stop to pause at somewhere nearby that will provide a sandwich and a soda.  And they’ve made good time.  Though it’s as well there haven’t been any traffic cops.  Professional courtesy only goes so far.

“Okay,” she says in a thoroughly put-upon tone.  Castle grins happily.  And grins more widely, unseen, because he’s managed to ensure that Beckett takes at least some care of herself.  His happiness is some way diminished when the truck stop’s selection of sandwiches looks more like salmonella in a bag, but it’s food.   Beckett doesn’t even notice how appalling it is.  She finishes in record time, takes the fastest restroom break he’s ever known a woman take by a factor of at least one hundred, and is chomping at the bit to get going again.

“You can finish up in the car, Castle.  You don’t have to drive.  Just don’t make a mess in my unit.”  He mutters darkly about the importance of time for digestion all the way back to the car and through his final mouthful of revolting and no doubt dangerously insanitary sandwich.  He needs all the soda to wash the disgusting taste away.

Lititz is not a large town, Castle discovers.  Not that he’s going to get a chance to explore.  Wandering around and enjoying the sunshine – with Beckett – is not going to happen.  She’s got one goal in mind, and she’s headed straight for the post office.  Small town post offices usually know everything, it transpires.  A useful nugget.  Though it’s looking as if post offices don’t know everything, or their lead is a washout, as photos of both their victim and their suspect prove fruitless. 

Beckett’s ready to give up and go back, defeated, when Castle thinks of one last thing.

“She might have scars, or walk with a limp.”  And suddenly they have their name, and moments later the address.  Time to go back, suspect with them.

It turns out to be a tale of double-cross: Beckett had been right when she thought that there was no honour among criminals.  The victim had aimed to kill the killer, and had herself been killed.  There are no good answers in this story.  She takes the killer down for processing with some regrets for the mess that everyone ended up in.

Castle’s left alone, contemplating coffee and when to tell Beckett that he knows she threw the hand, when Wax appears, hoping for a scoop.  Except that the silent journey back from Lititz had given him a lot of time to think, and what he thinks is that Wax had had a whole lot to do with this fiasco. He calls her on it, and though she denies it, it’s clear she’s been caught out.  She storms off, fuming, just as Beckett reappears, spots him in her chair before he can move, and looks like she’s about to start growling.  Seeing as they’d re-established a pretty comfortable working relationship over the course of the day, Castle bounces out at considerable speed.  Beckett still looks unhappy, though, and even Castle couldn’t say that this is a wholly satisfactory ending.  He tries an off-colour joke, which goes down about as well as his lunchtime salmonella sandwich, and then points out that at least it had been an exciting story, what with people pretending to be dead, living under assumed names, plotting fake suicides, and murder for revenge.  He doesn’t need a happy ending after all that.

Beckett remains unimpressed and uncheered, resolutely pessimistic.  Castle decides to cheer her up in a different fashion, and pulls out a fat wad of bills.

“Maybe this might cheer you up a little bit.  Your winnings.”

“My winnings?”  She pretends, deliberately very badly, to look surprised.  Castle is not fooled for a moment, nor did she want him to be.  Her mood improves dramatically.  She’s succeeded.  Level terms.  She suddenly feels wholly satisfied and quite happy with life.  The Ferragamos float to the front of her mind.  She analyses the expression on his face.  Clearly Castle didn’t like the tables being turned at all.  His next words prove it.

“Oh, don't play coy with me. You threw your hand.”  Beckett raises a sarcastic _so-how-did-you-like-it-then_ eyebrow, and then smirks very nastily as she tucks the cash away.  She hasn’t even counted it.

“All right, I was trying to be nice. I didn't want to embarrass you in front of your friends.”  She’s quite deliberately quoting him.  Castle winces.  The sting of having his own trick played back on him hasn’t diminished yet.  Still…

“Now we're even. So, what do you say to a” - he pulls a pack of cards from his pocket – “little showdown? Head to head, toe to toe, winner take all, mano a mujer.”

“Hand to woman?”  She looks at him quizzically, but under it he sees the banked embers flare.  So.  Not at all ruined, after all.  There’s still a whole lot of – something – under that cool, satisfied exterior.  _Careful, Rick.  Be very careful.  This is not up to you any more_.  He produces a slow smile, which simultaneously makes it clear that he wants to win and that he’s up for anything Beckett might propose.

“Whatever it takes.”  _Please, Beckett, let me take you_.  He thinks of all the ways he’s already put hand to woman.  This woman.  This complicated, frustrating, infuriating, fascinating, blisteringly hot woman that he so desperately wants back.  He waits for her answer, motionless as a predator stalking.

“You're on.”  His sigh of relief is heartfelt and completely invisible.  Let’s see where this goes now…

“No mercy,” he smirks.  _I’m in to win, Beckett.  Hear what I’m saying._   No concessions, no patronage, just fair play.  He has every intention of winning this cleanly.  Winning her cleanly, too.

“I'm gonna make you hurt.”  Beckett’s looking as if she’s every intention of cleaning him out.  No shortage of competitive instinct there.  No chance of her throwing this game.  Maybe if they play this to a standstill everything will be fixed.  He smiles more widely.

“Oh, you're gonna get hurt.”  And now he really, really wants to win, because Beckett’s lost the coating of reserve and is smiling evilly and is moving closer than she’s been all week - and reaching out to haul her against him and kiss all the snark out of her mouth is still going to be a really, really stupid thing to do.

“What are we playing for?”  Beckett wants there to be a prize?  Ah yes.  He remembers.  She likes winning – fairly – and she likes prizes.  Hmmm….

“Pride. Or clothing.”  That’ll annoy her.  Except that there’s another flash of heat in her eyes.  Castle’s confidence in the outcome of the evening is rising rapidly, albeit from a base some way below sea level.

“I think I got a bag of Gummibears.”  That’s not quite what Castle wants to taste.

“Shuffle.” He holds out the deck and Beckett snatches it from him.  Anyone would think she didn’t trust him.  (She’s right.  He’d learned to stack the deck from one of the stagehands when he was nine.  He’s used it occasionally since, normally when he wants to guarantee that someone else wins.  Not that he’d do it now.  He’s messed up enough already, and now that he’s getting the feeling that Beckett’s really into this game, all he needs to do is try his best to win.)

“Deal. Comfy with Texas Hold 'Em?”  She shuffles like a pro.  He watches her long fingers manipulate the pack and thinks about the other actions those fingers could take.

“I'm comfy so long as my cards come from the top of the deck.”  Beckett rolls her eyes in disgust.

“Huh. What you got up your sleeves?”

“Aside from my muscular arms?”  He’s flirting, now.  He thinks that’s still allowable.  It’s up to her if she responds.  But she’s looking him slowly up and down and there’s a tiny smile quirking at the corners of her mouth and then she sends a sultry look through her eyelashes and bites her lip and Beckett that is just _not fair_ because how is he supposed to concentrate when she’s doing that?  It’s _cheating_.  Ah.  She’s cheating – for a very particular, mutually understood definition of cheating - and she knows it.

“You wouldn’t be trying to distract me, now, would you, Beckett?”  His voice drops into a more intimate tone, but he shies away from his full on bedroom voice.  He’s still feeling his way today; ( _not a helpful phrase, Rick_ ) following her lead.  It’s got to be her lead, because right now he wouldn’t know whether she wanted it or not unless she starts it.  This explosive … thing… they had – have? - doesn’t wait for permission.  So he needs to.  He shifts uncomfortably.

“Distract you?” and _oh_ , that’s not a precinct tone. “Why would I want to distract you?”  Her smile has sharp edges in among the sensuality, and he’s instantly reminded of her terrifying competitiveness.

“I don’t know.  Maybe you don’t think you can win?”  Another edged smile.

“I don’t think.  I _know_ I can win.  Let’s play, Castle.”  _Oh, yes.  Please, Beckett, let’s play_.

Beckett takes the first hand, running a bluff on two tens that leaves Castle breathless at her poker face.  Castle takes the second with a straight flush.  Beckett’s dropped any distracting gestures, and is wholly focused on winning.  Castle has no intention of losing.  They’ve gradually got closer together.

“Third time pays for all, Beckett.  Let’s make it more interesting.”  She looks up, a question on her face.  “Dinner.”

“Dinner?”

“You do eat dinner, don’t you?  I win, you buy me dinner.  You win, I buy you dinner.  We agree on the restaurant, it’s just who pays that changes.  Soon as we’re done.”

Interesting, thinks Beckett.  That wasn’t quite what she’d expected when he started down that road.  From the barely-concealed arousal flaring from him, she’d thought it would be quite a different suggestion.  It belatedly occurs to her that he’s not pushing the pace; that it’s all up to her.  It also occurs to her that she’s hungry.  _For food, Kate, for food._   But she knows that dinner isn’t the only thing she wants tonight. 

“Okay.”  She has a sudden idea.  “We can go to Mari Vanna.”

“Mari Vanna?”  Castle has never heard of Mari Vanna.  But the sudden tinge of accent as Beckett says the words doesn’t wait for his ears to register the sound before it strokes down to his groin.

“You’ll like it.  Trust me.”

“Okay, you’re on.”  He’s pretty catholic in his taste in food. (except for today’s lunch)  And he could listen to Beckett using that particular accent for a very long time.  Two words of it really are not enough.

“My shuffle.”  Beckett picks up the deck and shuffles it in a way that is calculated to keep Castle’s attention firmly on the movements of her fingers, then – though that’s hardly the normal way to proceed - passes it to him to deal.  Her fingertips just brush across his as she does.  He looks up, as she knew he would, and she bites her lip gently.  Castle develops a sleek, predatory smile in return.  _Game on_. 

“My deal.”  _I’ll deal with you.  Oh yes.  Just the way you like it._   He flicks out the cards.  Beckett doesn’t touch hers: she looks at his hand on the deck, slowly brings her gaze up to his face, and slides the tip of her tongue over her lips.  She looks at her cards and pushes a handful of Gummibears in, languidly pulling her hand back.  The predatory smile adds an edge as Castle matches the bet.  He knows what game she’s playing now, and poker has only a very small connection with it.  He slides his chair a little forward.

“Trying to peek, Castle?”

“Oh, I can’t see your _cards_ from here.” 

He runs his eyes over her and lets arousal flow off him.  Her eyes darken. He deals the flop.  There’s not a twitch on her face.  She slides in another group of bears, and delivers a sultry look and another lick of her lips.  He matches her bet, again.  There’s nothing except the game and the cards and the close-caught atmosphere around them.  He’s got nothing, yet, and he hasn’t the faintest idea what Beckett might have.  It doesn’t help _at all_ that every time he tries to read her she produces an action that only makes him think of everything that mouth could be doing.  The next card goes down.  Beckett slowly brings her index finger up to her mouth as if thinking, slides it between her lips and he’d swear he saw her tongue twine round it.  He breathes very deeply and slowly.  He’s rock hard, and not simply pulling her up, hauling her into Observation and taking her up against the wall is taking all his control.  But he’s sure that, though she may not consciously be thinking of it that way, this is a test.  He’s good at tests.  He doesn’t intend to flunk this one.  Not when he can score A+.

She pushes in two more bears.  He thinks hastily.  Is she bluffing?  Or double bluffing?  Is he supposed to think that she’s got a poor hand (like his) or that she’s trying to make him think that it’s a poor hand so he bets high and then she’ll reveal a winning hand.  Her finger’s back in her mouth; wholly distracting.  He finds some game.

“Does oral stimulation help you perform, Beckett?”  She doesn’t blink.  Her finger leaves the pout of her lips with a lascivious pop.

“I find having something sweet to suck can be very helpful.  Don’t you?  Or maybe you need other performance aids?”

“I don’t need any performance aids to take you fair and square, Beckett.”  She raises an unimpressed eyebrow, but he sees the deeper breath.

“If you’re going to take this hand you’d better put your chips in.  Or you could always fold now.”  The taunting tone does not help him concentrate on the game.  He’s no closer to deciding whether she’s bluffing than he’d been a moment ago.  Still, he wants to win.  He lets the precinct persona slide away, pushes in five bears decisively. 

“Raise you.”  Beckett looks at him and matches it, then adds another three.

“Raise.”  This is interesting.  He’s still got nothing.  But Beckett’s not going all in.

“Raise you again.”  He pushes everything in.

“All in.”  Beckett shoves in her remaining pile of bears, and doesn’t turn a hair.  He flips out the last card.  Still useless.  He’s lost.  The game, but not, he thinks, the evening. Yep.  Beckett’s got three of a kind.  He’s got a lousy pair.

“Looks like I’ve won,” Beckett smirks.  “Time to pay up, Castle.”

“I always pay my dues.  I’ll give you exactly what you’ve asked for.  For winning, of course.”  He detects the soft gasp as she stands, and grins.  “Where’s this restaurant?”

“East 20th.  Wanna walk?”

“Sure.”  A cab might have more options, as it were, but not in the five minutes that the drive would take.  A walk, though, gives him a number of possibilities around accidental, and not-so-accidental, touching.  Starting right now.  He stands up and stretches his back and shoulders.  Beckett doesn’t even try to hide her amused gaze.

“Looking a little uncomfortable there, Castle.”  She’s not looking at his face.  He growls, gently, following her to the elevator and steering her in with a hand over her back.  He doesn’t take it away as the doors close.

“You cheated,” he husks, testing the waters.  He feels her shiver under the hand on her back, but her voice is light when she replies.

“Not at all.  _I_ deal from the top of the deck.”

“You _cheated_ , Beckett,” he growls.  He can feel her smile. 

“You’re just a sore loser.  It’s not my fault you can’t concentrate.”  And then the air around her changes.  “What are you going to lose tonight?”  She’s used the same words and enticing tone as the last time, and he’s sure she knows it.  Her eyes have darkened and she’s swayed fractionally towards him.

Only the ping of the elevator grinding to a halt stops Castle from continuing this discussion in a way which is certain to ensure that dinner is deferred.  He shakes some vestige of sense into his head and manages to exit the precinct without saying or doing anything to trigger his pent-up desire to shove Beckett into a cab and take her back to her apartment where he could do anything she wanted.  It’s not really helpful, though it is deeply satisfying, to be sure that she’s equally aroused.

“Are we going for dinner or not, Beckett?”


	42. Feel the rhythm

The walk to the restaurant proceeds largely in charged quiet.  Castle doesn’t quite ensure that he’s close enough to stroke Beckett’s hip as she deftly evades stray slowpoke tourists and pedestrians, but he certainly doesn’t take steps to avoid either that or the quick shifts of fingers brushing over each other.  Every time they touch, he feels the soft shiver of anticipation run from her to him and back again.  By the time they reach the door the tension between them is running high, and the space between their bodies has diminished until every step results in contact.

Castle looks at the green wood, the mildly chaotic flowers and other plants spilling on to the sidewalk and the flowery, slightly kitsch awning with Cyrillic lettering (he recognises that from a production of Uncle Vanya that his mother had been in).  “A Russian restaurant?”

“Yep.  Ever eaten Russian food, Castle?”

“No.  What am I letting myself in for?  Thin gruel from a gulag?”  She glares at him.  “Bear?”

“Not here.  Though I’ve tried it.  Bit tough.”  Castle files away the snippet. 

Inside it’s oddly old-fashioned: the design of the chairs, the white linen; almost-Victorian, heavily framed pictures and prints on the walls; a large cast iron stove; chandeliers.  His attention is distracted from the interior when a woman bustles out, smiles widely and happily at Beckett, who looks delighted to see her, and then says something to Beckett that means nothing at all to Castle.  It sounds like _preev-yat._   Beckett replies with a flood of incomprehensible chatter – _she can talk!  My God,_ thinks Castle, _do I need to learn Russian to get her to talk to me?_ – and gestures.  It’s a completely different Beckett from the one he sees every day, and from the one he’s seen in bed.  She’s expansive, and expressive, and it’s scorchingly hot.  The feel of the language on his ears delights his linguistic soul: growled rolling Rs, full-bodied vowels, a strange sound from the back of her throat that he’d think almost Scottish, harsh edges to so many words; so that if it weren’t for the evident delight that they have in seeing each other Castle would think it were a quarrel.  He simply listens to the flow of the sounds emanating from Beckett’s mouth and waits to be told – in English – what to do.  Eventually the two women stop their discussion – there is a rather interesting flush that’s developed along Beckett’s cheekbones which he’d like to understand – the woman pinches Beckett’s cheek in a motherly fashion and they’re shown to a table in the corner of the room.

“How often do you come here?  The – owner? – seems to know you well.”

“I’ve been coming here since it opened – it’s only been going a short time.  I used to go to the Uncle Vanya café in Midtown, but this is nicer for dinner.”

He’s about to ask why she comes here, but she avoids the punch before it’s thrown.  “I brought Lanie here.”  She looks mischievous.  “She was a little disconcerted.  I think she’s eaten everything from Austrian to Yemeni, but she’d missed out Russian along the way.   Borscht doesn’t seem to be her favourite food.”  There’s a very small snigger. 

“Borscht?”  Castle thinks he ought to remember what that is.  He’s definitely heard of it: he just can’t quite bring it to mind.  Not that he has a lot of mind spare for considering anything other than Beckett.  Specifically, Beckett’s intentions.  She’s indicating that he’s more than forgiven.  If he wasn’t so delighted by that, he’d wonder why. 

“Beetroot soup.”  Ah.  Not something he’d normally consider eating.  “Are you allergic to anything, Castle?”  That’s a bit of a non-sequitur.  What’s that got to do with anything? 

“No.”  Beckett smiles in a way that bodes ill.  Castle has a sudden attack of extreme suspicion, too late to do any good.

“Beckett…?”

“Don’t worry, Castle.  I won’t poison you.  Today.  You survived the truck stop sandwich, so you’ll survive this.”  And she pours out another flood of Russian to the same woman, gesturing widely to encompass Castle.  When she’s done, Castle looks hopefully at her.

“Do I get to know what you ordered?”

“Nope.  It’s a surprise.”  He pouts.  She snickers.  “Don’t you trust me, Castle?”

“On the job, yes.  Right now?  Not so much.”  She smiles slowly, and he mistrusts her even more.  The staff here didn’t even give him a menu.  It occurs to him to wonder what the initial conversation at the entrance had covered.

“Beckett, what were you discussing before we sat down?”  Beckett’s smirk does not incline him to ease.

“This and that.”

“Beckett.”  He drops into a more commanding tone.  It has no effect at all.  Clearly it only works in certain circumstances.  Such as her bedroom.  She grins.

“Curious, Castle?  How nice for you.”  She has no intention of succumbing to that velvet-over-iron tone, or telling him the details of that conversation.  Masha had asked her all sorts of questions about the _large, handsome_ man with her, along with handing her some completely unsolicited advice about how to make him happy.  It had been – well, blunt.  Masha had had some suggestions for the meal, too, but Beckett had her own ideas. 

“Beckett, that’s cheating.  Again.  It’s not fair if you know what we’re eating and I don’t.”  She just keeps on smiling and doesn’t tell him anything.  But he will deal with all this cheating, oh yes.  Later.  He smiles darkly back at Beckett and manages to make his intentions perfectly plain.

Beckett loves this restaurant.  Masha had been only too delighted to find she could speak fluent Russian, and as a result treats her like a relative every time she shows up.  The food reminds her of the best of Kiev – there’s not so much difference between Ukrainian and Russian cuisine as to jar her memories – and of a time when life was less dark.  She’s had her share of their vodkas, too, when she and Lanie came here last time.  Lanie’d had a particularly rough case – not, for once, one of Beckett’s – and had needed to forget it.  And copious quantities of vodka can provide a lot of forgetfulness.

When the food starts to arrive, Castle is looking rather bewildered.  Give the man credit, though, he looks as if he’s up for the experience.

“Beckett,” he pleads, “can’t you tell me what these are yet?  I only recognise the pancakes.”

“Just taste everything, Castle.  Then I’ll tell you.”  She rapidly divides everything into equal shares.  Beckett smiles happily.  “You know, I could get used to telling you what to do – and you actually doing it.”

Castle gives her a hot look.  “Really, Beckett?”  He drops to a deep, soft murmur.  “I thought you liked it when _I_ told _you_ what to do.”  She feels a renewed flare of heat rise, stoked when he runs a swift hard fingertip over her hand when she puts the knife down.  The stroke promises passion and possession in one movement.  She falters just a fraction.

He obediently tastes a little of everything. 

“Like them?”

“Yeah, delicious.  What are they?”

“Pirozhok – those little pies; blinis – not pancakes, Castle! – and khachapuri.”  He looks blank at the last.  “Cheese bread.  I love it.  It’s my absolute favourite.”  She pops a piece into her mouth and looks blissful as she swallows, then disappointed when she realises her portion is already all gone. 

“You don’t seem to like it as much.”  Her fingers steal across the table towards Castle’s plate.  A large hand descends on hers, imprisoning it.

“It’s my” – he emits a strangulated cough which appears to have been a completely failed attempt at pronouncing _khachapuri_ and Beckett looks at him pityingly – “bread,” he finishes.  His hand is still firmly over hers, preventing further assault on his portion, but his thumb has sneaked under her palm and is gently stroking.  There seems to be a direct nerve running from there to her core.   Funny how she’d never known that from basic biology class.

“First cheating and now theft.  What sort of an example is that for an NYPD detective to set?”  The look in his eye sends quivers through her stomach and hot need pooling between her legs.

“I didn’t cheat and I haven’t stolen anything,” she grins, searching for game.  “You lost, and if you aren’t going to eat your dinner you can’t complain when I do.”

“I am eating my dinner.  I’m savouring the tastes slowly.  One should always enjoy the flavours on one’s tongue in any situation.”  She’s perfectly certain that his statement does not only refer to food; nor does the hunger on his face.  The soft stroking is hypnotic.  That’s undoubtedly why she doesn’t pull her hand away: she’s been mesmerised into leaving it in place.

Castle decides that it’s a good time to distract Beckett’s predatory gaze from his bread. (which he is very much enjoying, and wishes to finish – himself)

“So where did you learn to play poker?”  It seems a fairly neutral question.

“My dad taught me, one summer when it did nothing but rain.”  She smiles reminiscently.  “I’m sure he let me win, to start with, but the day I cleaned him out of matchsticks he stopped that.  I was good at it so I played a bit through college.”

“And the poker face?”

“I’m a cop, Castle.  How well d’you think I’d do in Interrogation if I couldn’t manage a good poker face?”

“See now, that’s cheating, too.  Unfair advantage.”  Suddenly the tension’s rising again, as he mentions cheating.  Masha clears the appetizers, apparently oblivious, and returns with a plate of  - ravioli? – a chicken dish, some vegetables, and something that looks like oatmeal.  Then she says something in Russian to Beckett, who blushes fiercely, pulls her hand rapidly out from under Castle’s, and replies, flustered.  Masha laughs as she walks off, tossing a remark over her shoulder that does nothing to soothe Beckett’s flaming cheeks.

“Translation?”

“Nothing.”  She’s still blushing.

“That wasn’t nothing.  You’re blushing.  It’s cute.”  Beckett bares her teeth in a grimace that bears only a passing resemblance to a smile.  “She was teasing you about holding hands, wasn’t she?” 

Beckett nods.  It had been something like that.  Masha had been a little more… earthy… about what Beckett should be doing.  She thanks her stars that, to the best of her knowledge, Castle is resolutely monolingual, at least in modern languages, and changes the subject rapidly.

“Pelmeni,” she gestures at the ravioli-alikes, “chicken; kasha – that’s buckwheat.”  It’s all delicious.  But Castle would have deeply preferred it if Beckett’s hand had arrived back in range. 

Conversation has slowed, over the entrees, replaced by a few words laced with subtext and innuendo, sidelong, scorching glances and unspoken, swirling thoughts.  Heat crackles between them, unacknowledged; but the set of Castle’s shoulders and the restless, fidgety tapping of Beckett’s fingers tell their own tales.  Dessert is, by swift mutual consent in one hot back-and-forth look, ignored, and dinner finishes, late in the evening, with small cups of very strong coffee.  Apparently it should be tea, but Beckett’s coffee addiction overcomes authenticity without effort.  She insisted on coffee, simply to give her enough time to slow this down and leave the restaurant in good order.  It’s not working.  Castle’s lips on the small coffee cup, dwarfed by his large fingers, make her think of the dark heated nights they’ve shared and how he’s touched her with hand and mouth and body.  Castle sees Beckett’s tongue lapping at the rim of the cup and remembers everything her mouth promises – and delivers.

He takes care of the check expeditiously and waits with a well-faked semblance of patience while Masha unleashes another torrent of Russian - from the intonation, it’s advice; from the renewed blush on Beckett’s face, it’s advice on your boyfriend.  (and is that what he is?  More than a short affair, or a one night stand?)  When Masha’s done, yet again he takes the opportunity to touch, pressing a wide palm over her slim back in the leather jacket, half an inch inside discretion.

“May I see you to your home, Beckett?”  Lust-hazed or not, he can be careful of his words.

“You may.”  It’s permission, and this time he is not going to overstep her bright-line boundaries.  _Remember, Rick.  Wait, don’t push, don’t spook her.  Play her game, addict her slowly, and wait for her._

The dim rear of the cab they’ve picked up is thick with unvoiced currents drowning each choked attempt at conversation.  Now the action can’t be seen, Castle again takes calm, authoritative possession of Beckett’s hand, holding it firmly enough that she can’t slip away; delicately playing his thumb along the fine skin of her inner wrist.  The talons of her own desires spring out, softly scraping down her nerves.  She flexes her fingers over the hard muscle in his thigh; feels his response in the change in his breathing.   He switches the hand gripping hers and smooths the one he’s released over her knee.  The confines of the cab shrink a little; the space between them narrows, heat rises.

Beckett knows that this claustrophobic, smothering sexuality has to be broken before temptation takes over.  One misplaced word or touch and everything will erupt.  She doesn’t want that.  Not in the cab.

“Did you like Russian food?”  There’s a hitch in Castle’s rhythmic strokes, swiftly remedied.

“Yeah.  It was really good.”  His mind flits back to the language.  “It sounds strange.”

“What does?”

“Russian.  I couldn’t work out anything of what you were saying to - what did you call her?”

“Who?”

“The woman in the restaurant.”

“Oh, Masha.”  She looks back into memory, relaxed by the comforting familiar food and the language.  He looks confused by the unfamiliar name, and she expands.  “Marya.  It’s a diminutive.  I got so confused for the first month I was in Kiev: everyone seemed to have the same names.  I found out that there aren’t many names in use.”  Castle looks enquiring.  “Oh, for women it’s Tatiana or Marya or Svetlana or Elena or Irina or Ludmila – there are others but that covers about half of everyone you meet.  Then they get shortened for family or friends – sometimes differently for each - and you end up knowing twenty Tatyas.”  Castle spies an opportunity.

“What did they call you, then?”  Beckett is not to be drawn.

“Wouldn’t you like to know?”

“C’mon.  You have to tell me your name sometime.”

“No, I don’t,” Beckett says smugly.  “You can call me Beckett.”  She licks her lips in a way that belongs in an X-rated movie and gives him a heated glance through her swept lashes.  “Or Mistress.”  Castle takes a slow, deep breath and declines the offered bait.  This is a cab, not a private place.  But he won’t be calling her _Mistress_ any time soon.  Simply – _Mine_.

“Didn’t you hear it from Masha?”  Not that he’d have picked it up.  Masha calls her Katya, not Kate.

“How was I supposed to hear anything at that speed?”  He makes an _it’s-not-fair_ face as the cab comes to a halt outside Beckett’s block.  This time she doesn’t do anything more than raise an eyebrow when he pays and follows her inside and into the elevator with his hand placed firmly on her waist, holding her into him.

“You should have listened more carefully.  You snooze, you lose, Castle.”

 “I’ve already lost the game, all my Gummibears...”

“ _My_ Gummibears,” Beckett interjects possessively.   

“…and the cost of dinner.  I don’t think I’ve anything left to lose.”  He pauses, hesitating for a second, then dives right in.  “You, on the other hand, have plenty to lose.”  Beckett looks amused.

“I won.  It’s not my fault that you were…” – she bites her lip seductively – “...distracted.  You need to work on your focus, Castle.  It seems a little… lacking.”

“You cheated,” he growls.  “Cheating has consequences.  I thought you’d learned that.”

“Maybe you should teach me again,” she murmurs. 

He’s on her mouth in an instant, suddenly sure of his invitation, her permission, sure it’s her desire.  He lets go for long enough to enter her apartment, then retakes her with a hard kiss, holding her in against him as tightly as he can because he hasn’t had her properly in his arms since Tuesday and he so nearly didn’t have her again at all.  He can’t bear it when she walks away from him.  People don’t - she shouldn’t - walk away from him.  Except that’s not up to him.

He kisses her more roughly, possessively: taking everything she gives and giving back; tongues duelling; his hands sweeping over the curve of her back and aligning her into his body so she can’t mistake his need.  Her hands come up round his neck, her leg around his waist, and she rolls into him as he simply picks her up and deposits both of them on the couch with her straddling him.

He’s right where she wants him, where she needs him, nipping her lip where she normally bites it; moving round to her neck and teasing, tasting, finding the sensitive nerve and making her squirm against his erection, whispering evil, dirty suggestions into her ear that only make her wetter, hotter.  She wrestles his button down open and presses into his chest, rubbing, taking hard friction where she wants it most, clawing against the muscle in his shoulders (when does he work out?) and biting down over his collarbone and from the sounds he’s making that’s doing it for him and her leather jacket’s long gone and the thin tee under it whipped over her head and his eyes are feral and _fuck_ she is not going to last much longer and _consequences_ be damned.  There’ll be time to play in other ways later, when she’s had him take her fast and rough and just how she needs it _right now_.  All the stretched-out, suffocating sexual tension since he pulled out the deck of cards has come to a point right here.  She opens his pants and strokes through the slit in his boxers and scrapes just hard enough to bring him to complete attention and _oh_ she’s suddenly flat on her back with no shoes and no pants and hard hands palming and kneading and stroking and _oh_ she reaches for him again and digs her nails in as he strokes her soaked centre and he groans and her panties disappear and he’s inside her and he’s almost too big but it feels so _good_ and _ohh_ the world drops away.

He has to slow up.  It’s all too fast, too uncontrolled; flaring too hot to survive without incineration.  But with his hands on her body and her moving under him in her _fuck-me_ lingerie and making those _noises_ that drive him insane and she’s wet and hot and receptive and desperate (he’s desperate) and slowing up seems like a distant dream.  She’s pulling him down on to her and _oh_ he loves the way her nails bite into him when she wants him to take her hard and fast and rough and he cups her and she’s so ready and _oh_ the way she touches him leaves him almost mindless and he’s not capable of denying her anything she wants right now and he tugs her panties off and she opens for him and _that_ is where he has to be and one hard thrust takes him there and both of them right over.

He’s probably crushing her.  But he needs a moment: to recover, to hold her, to remember who he is.  And, more importantly, what he isn’t.  He isn’t her boyfriend.  He isn’t her lover, in the generally accepted sense of being in a relationship.  He isn’t her partner, except – maybe – at work. 

He isn’t, yet, anything.  But he will be.  He has to be.

 


	43. Dance the magic dance

He rolls over and simply holds her on him, against his chest, for that necessary moment.  When she’s tucked into him like this, he can’t doubt that there’s more here than just a brief encounter, or a series of disjointed encounters that don’t contain a story arc.  If only he could hold her close more often, then she’d recognise the connection, _see_ him clearly.  She wouldn’t back away, then, she’d share her soul as well as her body, let him take her pain away, take care of her when she needs it, for as long as they both shall last.  _Make me forget_ slides through his mind, hand in hand with her reaction to the music.  Another two issues she won’t talk about.  He sits up, taking her with him, continues to hold her tightly, nose buried in her hair.  Just for a moment.  It’s all he’ll be allowed.

It’s that protective, possessive grip, again.  She’d been brought into it before she’d even realised that was what was happening.  It shouldn’t feel this good.  It shouldn’t remind her of the earlier comfort that had arrived unasked – and left again before she’d even asked for it to go.  It had, in fact, stayed firmly within bounds.  Okay.  Boundaries established.  Yes.  It’s okay, then.  Just for a moment.  She relaxes into him and stays close.

She squeaks in surprise when Castle stands up with her still in his arms and sweeps her into her bedroom, any vestiges of protective hold disappearing.  Possessive, on the other hand, is still very definitely present.  She can deal with that.  Possessive and dominant: that idea she likes - in the bedroom.  Nowhere else.  It’s suffocation she doesn’t need and doesn’t want.  Anywhere.

“We were going to discuss _cheating_ , Beckett.”  She looks up at him innocently from where he’s dropped her on her bed.

“Were we?  Is there something you need to tell me?”  Castle growls at her.

“I don’t cheat, Beckett.  At anything.”  That’s got an edge under it that she recognises.  Integrity. Hmm.  “You, on the other hand, cheated all the way through that poker game and through ordering dinner.”  And now he’s back to the teasing, seductive tone that he started with.  She looks, if it were possible, even more angelically innocent.

“You only claim I’m cheating when you lose.  You’re just a sore loser, Castle.  Better get used to losing, if you’re going to hang around the precinct.”  She smiles tauntingly. 

“It’s not losing, if you cheat.  Cheating has consequences, Beckett.  You need to pay up.”  He runs a predatory, hungry gaze over her naked body, and she stretches out, letting him see the small signs of renewed arousal.  “How are you going to pay your losses?”

“Oh, I can find a way to pay you in full.”  Beckett’s voice is suddenly the rustle of hot wind through torn silk.  “I know what you want.”  She slithers off the bed, fluid motion, brings her mouth to his where he stands, drops quick sharp kisses down his body until she’s kneeling in front of him and looking up, licks her lips and he gasps and is instantly, painfully hard again.  “Don’t you?  You like it when I kneel, when I stroke you like this” – she trails wicked fingers over him, slides up and down, cups his weight – “and when I take you in my mouth.”  She leans forward and her lips glide over him.

It’s not the first time she’s done this.  But it is the first time she’s knelt before him and it’s everything she’d promised back when she first suggested she would.  The submissive position and her lips and her tongue and _Christ_ the scrape of teeth and his hands in her hair and _fuck_ she takes all of him into the wet cave of her mouth and she’s too hot, too dirty and it’s all far too much as his hips jerk into her without his permission and she twines her tongue and it’s totally _filthy_ and he comes _hard_.

He collapses on to her bed and pulls her with him, preventing her going anywhere that isn’t right here next to him until he can find his focus again.  She looks thoroughly self-satisfied, a cat-like smile lingering on her lips. 

“Paid in full,” she purrs, and smirks.  The smirk disappears when she tries to roll away and finds she can’t: his arm under her neck, around her shoulder, holding her in place.

“You don’t think I’m going to let you go, do you?”  Seduction slinks over her.  “You’re all mine and I’m keeping you.  I’m not finished with you.”  He develops a slow, sensual smile that causes her to squirm against him, and looms up and over her.  “Not paid in full, Beckett.  Not yet.  I’m going to extract the rest of your payment now.  You’re going to _beg_ me to collect from you.”  He leans down, traps her with a heavy thigh over her legs, a hand on her shoulder, and kisses her deeply, tasting traces of himself still in her mouth.  His free hand traces circuitous patterns downward from her clavicles, stops at her cleavage to experiment with tiny pinches to her nipples, soft strokes that don’t satisfy but only stoke sensation, trickles further down as he nips on her mouth and catches her gasp.  His mouth follows his hand: nipping and soothing; sucking followed by delicate bites just on the right side of the pleasure/pain divide; till she’s trying to move under him and every attempt at movement that doesn’t succeed winds her higher; rubbing herself against the roughness of his leg and moaning.

“You like it like this.  You like me bringing you higher.  Don’t you?”  She whimpers.  It might be _Yes_.  His fingers wander lower, past her navel, brief circle and then further.  She tries to arch into him, fails, held down by his weight.  “Nuh-uh.  You need to wait.  I’ll take you there.  All in good time, Beckett.”  He flickers fingers past where he should have stopped, and listens to the frustrated mewl.  “Something wrong, Beckett?”

The deep, sensual amusement in his velvet voice, the knowledge that he has her precisely where he wants her and she can’t do anything about it runs down Beckett’s skin and soaks in; puddles between her legs and leaves her liquid and wanting.  “Touch me,” she forces out. 

Castle looks down at her with heat in his face and runs a finger over her inner thigh.  She writhes.  “There?”  She whimpers again.

“Properly.  Stop teasing.”

“I’ll touch you properly when you ask properly.  What do you say, Beckett?”  He carries on flickering his fingers over everywhere except where she wants them, stopping her moving into his hand, adding short sharp nips and laving kisses where they add to her tension but don’t bring relief.

“Please.  Touch me – _ohh_.” His fingertips slide over her.

“Is that better?”  He does it again, and she bucks hard into him.  “I like you like this.  Wet and open and completely not in control of anything at all.”  Her fingers claw into his back as he strokes harder, circles round her.  “I could do this all night: keep you on the edge.  Would you like that?”  She gasps.  It sounds like _No_.  He switches position, slides down between her legs and spreads her wide.  “You’re so wet.”  He grins ferally.  “But you haven’t paid yet.”  His tongue flicks across her hip, followed by a bite.

“Castle,” she chokes, as his finger slides into her.   “that’s not – _ohh -_  fair.”

“Cheating’s not fair, Beckett.   Have I taught you the consequences yet?”    A second finger slips into her, and she squirms as he glides them in and out slowly, stimulating every nerve ending she possesses.

“Stop _teasing_.  _Please_.” 

“Have you learned about consequences?”  Stop _talking_ , Castle.  The words are driving her as wild as his fingers.

 _“Yes._ ”  He replaces fingers with mouth and she screams.

“Are you ready to pay up?” He licks and then sucks and she screams again.

“ _Yes_.  Please, Castle.”

“What do you want, Beckett?”  He licks again, holding her right on the verge of oblivion.

“Let me come, _please Castle now Castle fuck don’t stop.”_   And he sends her up and over the edge.

When she opens her eyes again she’s back to being tucked into him and cuddled.  It’s odd, that he’s so keen on being in command and yet, given the slightest chance, after each time he cuddles into her like a child with his favourite teddy bear.  It suddenly occurs to her that he might need to give that protective, possessive embrace; rather than him thinking that she needs to receive it.  She tidies that thought away for later study.  It adds an interesting twist to where she might set her boundaries.  It’s far more palatable to think that he needs to hold her, than to believe that he thinks she needs held.  And therefore, she doesn’t pull away, lets him keep her there.  After all, if _he_ needs it, why should she not provide it?  It’s not her who needs anything, so it’s no breach.

Yet again, a piece of wholly convoluted and self-deceptive reasoning gets her to where she wants to be: an excuse to stay very comfortably wrapped up against Castle.  Because if she were honest with herself, she’d either have to send him home to preserve her self-imposed boundaries, which she doesn’t want to do, or accept that her boundaries are thoroughly non-existent and, more, unwanted.  She’s not prepared to accept either point, at this time.  (He said he didn’t want a relationship.)

Eventually Castle has, at least for now, had his fill of cuddling Beckett as close as he can manage without actually suffocating her and without talking.  He’s been petting her gently, but he stops when she rolls out of his arms to lie bonelessly a little apart from him.  She doesn’t seem inclined to talk.  Not that this is a surprise.  He decides on a circuitous route.

“You okay?”

“Yes.  Why shouldn’t I be?”

“Well, you know, those dizzy spells you were getting…  I thought I might have induced another one, since you haven’t snarked for at least ten minutes.”

“Dream on, Castle.”

“An..d – it’s back to normal.  Seriously, Beckett, you’re not ill or anything?  Because if you are it’s very unfair of you to give it to me.”

“I don’t think you’re in danger of catching anything.  Though if you caught the ability to help with the paperwork that would be an improvement.”

“It’s boring.  I don’t like being bored.  Solving cases is interesting, but paperwork isn’t.”  He can feel Beckett roll her eyes without even seeing her do it.

“It’s necessary.  I explained that.”

“Don’t knock your coffee over it.”

“What?”

“When you have your next dizzy spell.  Actually, I know what caused it,” he says smugly.  Beckett looks resigned.

“What?”

“You were overcome by my manly presence.”  Beckett bursts into laughter.  Castle leans up on one elbow and switches off the silliness for a moment.  “Want me to show you – again – just how manly I can be?  You weren’t laughing last time.”

“Dunno, Castle.  Will it be worth my while?”

“Oh yes, Beckett.  But before I show you,” he runs his gaze over her, “if you’re not ill, and it’s not that you’re overcome by my masculine strength and rugged handsomeness, why’d you get dizzy?”  Beckett shrugs, uninterested in discussing that episode.

“Just one of those things.  ‘S not your problem.”

“It is, too.”

“How’d you get to that” – he hears _crazy_ – “idea?”

“I’m your partner so if you have a dizzy spell then I’ll have to catch you.  And then I’ll have to deal with the bad guys all on my own.”  Beckett looks bewildered until she plays that back.  Then she glares.

“First, I’m not going to have dizzy spells.  Second, you don’t deal with bad guys, I do.  I’m the cop.  Third, you can’t be my partner.  You’re not a cop so you’re not allowed to be my partner.  Only cops can be cops’ partners.”

Castle’s instant reaction of annoyance and hurt only lasts a second as the _last_ sentence of what she’s just said hits his brain, not just his ears.  She’s only said that he’s not her partner because he’s not a cop.  She _hasn’t_ said that she doesn’t want him as a partner, just that he isn’t officially qualified to be so.  He returns to the main question.  He wants some truth.

“How do you know you won’t have dizzy spells?  I don’t know that.”  He looks pious.  “What if I get hurt?  You’d have that on your conscience.  I wouldn’t want you to feel guilty for the rest of your life.”

Beckett glares again.  “Not likely.  Dizzy spells, you getting hurt or me feeling guilty.”

“I need evidence.  Or I’ll tell Espo and Ryan that you’re getting dizzy spells.  They’ll wrap you up in cotton-wool and then you’ll be cross.  Crosser.”

“Crosser is not a word, Castle.”

“It is if I say it is.  Best-selling novelist here.  So why were you dizzy?”

Beckett gives up.  He’s as persistent as a hornet and twice as annoying, and if she doesn’t give him something to stop this he’ll be almost as painful.  Especially if he enlists Espo.  Espo knows far too much to allow that to happen.  She doesn’t _think_ Espo would spill, but she also doesn’t want to take the chance.  Castle is far too persuasive.

“I was hungry and decaffeinated.”  Castle grins appreciatively at the last word but then looks thoroughly disbelieving and drops any semblance of amusement.

“Why do you lie to me?  You know I’ll spot it.”  He hopes he’ll spot it.  He’s not sure he will, now he’s seen her play poker.  But he can try.  “It coincided far too neatly with that piece of music – whatever it was?”

“Danse Macabre.  Don’t you know that?”  The snark is intended as a distraction, and fails miserably.

“No.”  He’s lying.  He’d recognised it.  “Why won’t you just tell me the truth?”

“Bad memories.  There.  Truth.  Happy now?  This is none of your business.  Drop it, Castle.  Your health is in no danger.”  She turns her back on him, no longer interested in any of the more active… interactions, and wriggles under the comforter, pulling it over her head as she curls back into him.  Tries to.  The bed shifts, and he isn’t there.  Beckett ignores the movements.  If he doesn’t want to stay longer, that’s fine.  Just fine.  She doesn’t sulk.  Therefore she can’t be sulking.  She just doesn’t want to talk any more.  She wanted cuddled, not questioned.  There are footsteps, then rustling from the main room, then footsteps back again.  The comforter is pulled back to her chin.

“Night, Beckett.  Till tomorrow.”  Oh.  He is going.  Right.  He can leave whenever he wants to.  It doesn’t make any difference to her.  None at all.

“Paperwork day tomorrow,” she mutters.  She pulls the covers back over her head.

“Maybe not, then,” Castle says chirpily.  She hears him exit.  Of course she doesn’t want him there.  Now, or tomorrow distracting her.  It’s good he’s gone.  Boundaries.  No sleepovers, remember?  It’s good that she hadn’t had to tell him to leave.  Really.  But she misses his nice warm presence.

Castle hadn’t wanted to leave at all.  But he could see the precipice looming and could also see himself heading towards it without brakes.  He’d wanted truth.  He’d got two words of truth, which is two more than he usually gets.  But he’d forced it, she’d hidden – quite literally – so he’d taken the hint and gone before she’d got around to telling him to go.  And if she thinks he’s backed off a little – well, that’s just a bonus.  He hadn’t missed her expression when she’d realised he was going.  She hadn’t looked too happy about it.  He grins widely, all the way home.

* * *

 

Paperwork is boring.  The precinct is boring.  And Beckett is very, very bored.  Castle, of course, has been nowhere to be seen all day.  Paperwork is not his thing.  And anyway, she needs some space, away from him.  She’s fine that he hasn’t been by, or been in touch, and that he left when he did last night.  Just fine.  It’s exactly what she wants: he’s respecting her boundaries.  She picks up her phone and dials Lanie, rather than think about how bored her boundaries are leaving her.

“Lanie, it’s Kate.  You busy tonight?”

“Well, I’ve got a queue of customers, but they won’t mind waiting.  I don’t hear any of them complaining.”

“Want to get some dinner, maybe a drink or two?”  Lanie looks at the phone rather worriedly.  Normally she encourages Kate to go out.  This is the second time in three weeks that Kate’s done the asking.  She sounds a little – well, _needy_ , insofar as Kate ever sounds as if she might need anything.  Certainly it’s closer to a _please will you come out with me_ than Lanie normally hears.

“You okay, girl?”  There’s an infinitesimal pause, only detectable if you’re listening for it.  Which Lanie was.  So.  Kate’s not wholly okay.

“Sure.  Why wouldn’t I be?”  _Oh_ , thinks Lanie, _so many reasons.  Where shall I start, Kate?_

“I’m free.”

“Fine.  I’ll swing by at six, pick you up?  You can choose where – or come back to mine and we’ll get takeout.  I’ve got plenty wine.”  Lanie considers.  Restaurant or takeout… hmm.  At Kate’s, of course, Kate can’t just leave. 

“Takeout and wine.  I’ll bring a bottle too.  It’s silly you coming all the way over here just to go back to yours again.  I’ll be there around seven, ‘kay?”

“Okay.  Bye.”

Beckett manages to finish up for the day without actually standing in the middle of the bullpen screaming to alleviate her paperwork-induced boredom and her entirely unacknowledged frustration.  She succeeds in vacating the precinct without more than a handful of only mildly bitter comments from Ryan and Esposito on the subject of part-timers, which she deals with condignly along the lines of _if you put as much effort into the paperwork as you do into getting a new high score on PacMan you’d be done too._   She leaves with a satisfied strut as the boys are still gobbling like turkeys behind her.  Ryan looks blankly at Esposito.

“What the hell is PacMan anyway?”  Esposito shrugs.  When they look it up they’re even more insulted.

Beckett gets home in short order, undertakes a rapid first-pass tidy up and puts a second bottle of good Californian white in the fridge.  She has a much more careful look round - and opens a window – to make sure that there are no traces at all of anything… untoward… that might trigger Lanie’s bloodhound instincts.  Such as stray clothes in unexpected places, or a whiff of cologne.  Satisfied that if there _were_ any tracks, they are now well and truly covered, she dumps an eclectic collection of takeout menus on the table, opens the already-chilled bottle, and pours herself a large glass.  She’s relievedly sipping when Lanie knocks.

Lanie unobtrusively assesses Kate as soon as she gets in.  Nothing’s overtly wrong, but Kate doesn’t usually ask for anything, and Lanie detects a layer of tension that wasn’t there a week ago.  It’s not what she’d wanted to detect.  She’d _wanted_ to detect signs of a hot affair with Writer-Boy.  No such luck.  Though the silver lining to _that_ is that she, Lanie, still has a stake in the pool.  It’s up to $250, since Karpowski heard about it.  Esposito and Ryan better be careful.  If Kate overhears, they will be floating in the Hudson.

Beckett’s already holding out a brimming glass, and it seems she’s already started.

“Wassup, girl?  You didn’t wait for me?”

“Case over – yesterday.  Paperwork all day.  Uggh.  I needed it, and you’re late.”  Lanie quirks an eyebrow.

“I’m not.  It’s only just after seven.  Anyway.  Staring at forms all day is bad for you.”  Beckett nods in vigorous agreement.  “You should stare at Writer-Boy’s fine ass instead.”  Beckett chokes and splutters on her wine.  By the time she’s recovered Lanie has almost stopped laughing.

“Lanie!”

“What?  It’s a damn fine ass.  Better to look at it than forms.”  Beckett is _positive_ that she’s not blushing.  But she still fights back rapidly.

“Not why I called you, Lanie.”  Lanie makes a hugely disappointed face at her.

“You should get intimately acquainted with Writer-Boy’s fine ass, Kate.  And the frontal view.”  Beckett chokes again.

“Can you leave Castle’s ass out of this discussion?”  She grins absolutely evilly as an idea occurs to her.  “If you want his ass you have it.  If you’re _that_ keen on his ass” – she snickers – “you could always grab it next time he’s in the morgue.”  _But if you do I will shoot you_.  That thought stays off her face, fortunately.  Lanie looks genuinely shocked.

“Why, Katherine Beckett!  How much wine have you already had?”  _Because you know and I know that if I did that you’d shoot me._

“Not nearly enough,” Beckett mutters.  Lanie’s ears prick up.

“What’s up?  Man trouble?”  _If only_ , Lanie thinks.

“Nah.”  Beckett hesitates, looks uncertainly under her eyelashes at Lanie.  “Dreams.”  _Oh shit_ , Lanie thinks. 

“What do you mean, dreams?”


	44. Stalking you and tracking you down

“You know those movies you get in your head when you’re asleep?  Dreams.”

Lanie aims a slap at Beckett’s hand.  “You know what I meant, girl.  Spill.”

Beckett hesitates again.  Even with Lanie, who knows the whole story from the last time, talking about it isn’t easy for her.  She delays a fraction by swallowing a large gulp of her wine.

“Like last time.  I need to get the dead out of my head, Lanie.  This last case was bad.  I keep seeing her face in the oil.  And then the others come too.  So I thought maybe if we had an evening and a glass or two of wine I could tell you about it – medical confidentiality and all that – and that would sort it out.  Like it did last time.”  Lanie remembers that _last time_ had only been a couple of months ago.  Shortly before Writer-Boy arrived on the scene, in fact.  She gazes keenly at Beckett.  She supposes that Beckett is at least acknowledging that there’s an issue this time.  That’s new.

“Okay, talk.  I won’t say a word to anyone belonging to the precinct.”  That’s been very carefully worded, and Lanie sees the evasive wording slide right by Kate.  “You want my advice, though?  You need to get yourself some life and some fun.  Go on a date, have a booty call.  It’s not as if there isn’t someone right next to you who’d oblige.  Writer-Boy’s been handing you gilt-edged invitations for weeks, and all you do is throw them in the trash.”  Unhappily, that doesn’t raise the slightest hint of a guilty twitch.  “Now, what’s going on?”

Beckett explains the nightmares, minimising as much as she dares, _certainly_ not mentioning Castle in the context, and wincing under Lanie’s scalpel-sharp interrogation and too-knowing eyes.

“You know what you need?”

“Five minutes ago you told me I needed a booty call.  Now what?”

“You need a vacation.”  Beckett looks mildly less unhappy with that suggestion.  Lanie wouldn’t describe it as wholesale enthusiasm, though.  “Even if it’s just a couple of days out the precinct wandering around Manhattan shopping.  Let a different team take the next case.  You’ve gotta take a break, Kate.  You know it.  How much time have you got built up?”

Beckett flushes.  “I knew it.  Too damn much, girlfriend.  Now, here’s what you’re gonna do.”  Lanie is in full bulldozer mode.  “Monday morning, if no body’s dropped, you go into Montgomery and you ask for two personal days.  You oughta take a week, but you won’t.  So you take tomorrow, when you’re off anyway, and two more days.  And you call and tell me you’ve asked him, too.  If I don’t get a call by nine-thirty, I’ll call Montgomery my own self and tell him that my medical advice is that you need a break.”

Beckett makes a childishly disgruntled face at Lanie, who is entirely unimpressed.  “You do it, girlfriend.  Go shopping, or walk in the park, or bake cookies.  No crime, you hear me?  Not even if you see someone push someone else under a train right under your nose.”  Beckett wrinkles said nose at Lanie.  “Oh, okay then.  But only if it’s right in front of you and there’s no other cops within sight.  And no going near the precinct.  None, you hear me?”

By the time they’ve finished the first bottle, got some Thai and started on the second bottle, Beckett’s relaxed a bit.  She only ever talks to Lanie, but tonight, somehow, and most unusually, she feels better for it.  Maybe talking about difficult issues is something that gets easier if you do more of it.  No.  That’s not a good idea.   Next thing she’ll be talking to Castle, who is far, far too easy to talk to, and then it will all go horribly, horribly wrong, again.  Her history’s not for talking about.

Sunday passes quietly for Beckett: domestic issues, a call with her father talking about nothing in particular: she doesn’t put stress on him by telling him much about her cases or any problems she might be experiencing.  Safer not to give him any information that might upset him.  He’s been sober for five years, but he’s only ever a short distance away from the edge.  So she tells him about the fundraiser, and the poker games with the team (but not the tie-breaker between herself and Castle), and not the nightmares, or Castle, or her chat with Lanie, or the days off that Lanie’s told her to take.

Monday morning Beckett does what Lanie’s told her, knowing that Lanie is perfectly capable of interfering if Beckett doesn’t comply, and presents herself at Montgomery’s desk as soon as he’s organised himself.

“Detective Beckett?” he says, surprised.

“Sir.”  He raises his eyebrows when she doesn’t instantly continue.  “Sir, may I take two days off?  Today and tomorrow?”  Montgomery lowers his brows to half-mast.  Beckett doesn’t sound to him as if she’s overly enamoured of taking time off.  He regards her searchingly, and notes small signs of tiredness and creases of stress around her eyes.  He also notes that her tone holds more desire for him to say _no_ than _yes_. 

“I think that would be a good idea, Detective.”  He smiles sweetly.  “We’ll see you on Wednesday.  Have you any plans?”  Beckett’s flash of frustration is plain, now that he’s looking for it. 

“Nossir.  I’ll see what looks good.  Thank you, sir.”  Gratitude is not the emotion most prominent in her reply.  She exits Montgomery’s office, lets the boys know she’s not in till Wednesday, and departs.  Once she’s out the building she calls Lanie, who is unreasonably triumphant that Beckett’s behaved, as Lanie puts it, _like a sensible adult rather than an over-committed teen_.  It’s no consolation at all.  Beckett doesn’t have a clue what to do with herself.  She’d expected Montgomery to say _no_.

She wanders out into Manhattan and remembers that her winnings are still burning a hole in her wallet.  She might as well go see those Ferragamos.  She swings off to Fifth Avenue and is delighted to discover that not only are the shoes she’d seen in stock, in her size, but her winnings are sufficient to buy them with some left over.  She may still not know what to do with the rest of the day but she’s well-funded to do whatever it is she might decide upon.

Castle, having spent the weekend happily bickering with his family and writing, both of which have managed to temper his impulse to call Beckett and wrench some answers out of her, arrives in the precinct late morning on Monday, despite the lack of any calls relating to new bodies, to relieve his own boredom and avoid the nagging presence of his screen saver.  He’s temporarily out of inspiration.  And if there’s no new body, then he’s intending to invite – not take – Beckett out to lunch and deal with all the questions that he still hasn’t managed to ask about how Homicide cops get to be Homicide cops.  He’s even got a list, to prove that it’s research.  Which it is.  It’s only that it’s research for two stories, not one: Nikki Heat and Detective Beckett. 

When he gets to the precinct and finds that Beckett is missing, his first thought is that she’s had a body and not called him because she’s still mad about him asking questions.  He quickly realises that this is (one) stupid and (two) wrong.  Stupid, because being written up for insubordination won’t be in Beckett’s game plan – if she’d been prepared to do that, she’d have done it weeks ago.  Wrong, because Ryan and Esposito are at their desks, staring at screens and paperwork, and looking bored and depressed.

“What’s wrong?”

“Paperwork.  I hate paperwork.”

“No new bodies?”

“No.  Killers have all gone on vacation this week.  Prob’ly together.  With luck they’ll off each other.  Why’re you here?”

“Research.  I’ve got a whole list of questions to ask about how you become a cop and then a Homicide cop.  Where’s Beckett?”

“Personal days.  Not in till Wednesday.”  Castle looks mildly disappointed.  He’s concealing severe disappointment and some irritation.  She hadn’t told him she wouldn’t be there.  The fact that he hadn’t contacted her either doesn’t register.

“Can I ask you instead?”  Ryan and Esposito look resignedly at each other.

“Do we have to?”

“Yes,” grins Castle.  “But I’ll buy lunch, to help your memories.”  That makes it rather more worthwhile, at least for Ryan and Esposito.  Castle’s not nearly as sure.  He is, in fact, unwarrantedly annoyed that Beckett didn’t tell him she had a couple of days off.  The point that he has no right or authority to know that and Beckett has no duty or necessity to call him if no body’s dropped isn’t really registering.  He’s entitled to follow her around, so she should tell him if she isn’t going to be there.  She shouldn’t just pick him up and put him down.  He forgets that it’s he who pushes to spend time with her; it’s not she who calls him when she’s nothing better to do. 

Well.  If she’s going to be missing when he’d expected her to be there, he can do the same.  He remembers that he owes a random woman a dinner date thanks to his mother’s auctioning him off.  He wouldn’t do it, if he didn’t have to, ( _You’ve never cheated? How virtuous, kitten._ ) but since he does have to, he’ll just do that.  And then he’ll at least have a story to tell next time he sees Beckett.  (the idea that she might be a teensy bit jealous that he’s taking other women for dinner doesn’t make it out the small, dark corner of his mind that it’s lurking in.  But it’s there, whether he notices it or not.)  But first, lunch with the boys.

In fact, it’s good to have lunch with the boys.  It’s certainly a lot less damaging to his ego than Beckett’s persistent and apparently innate ability to reduce him to rubble with one well-directed, stinging comment.  And he does learn a lot about becoming cops.  The back stories for Raley and Ochoa – he’s found some believable names – are coming together.

When lunch is over, though, he’s had another idea.  He doesn’t know enough about how the ME’s office runs, or the doings of the morgue attached to it.  He’ll make a call and get this undoubtedly boring dinner date arranged: somewhere splashy, public and very much in keeping with his playboy PR, which will keep Paula happy as well.  She’s started to complain that he’s dropped off the celebrity party circuit.  Gina, on the other hand, hasn’t complained once since he sent the outline to her.  He’s unbelievably far ahead.  Today’s lunch, and questioning Lanie, will preserve that happy, and abnormal, state of affairs.  But once he’s made that call, and set up dinner for  - hmm, Wednesday or Thursday, so he can tell Beckett he’s going out – he’ll go over to the morgue and see if Lanie is available to answer questions.  The same ones that he’s just asked the boys will do quite nicely.  And if he should just happen to enquire about Beckett, that’s okay.  He’s always rather had the feeling that Lanie would be only too happy to see Beckett fall into his arms – or bed – though he’s not sure why.  His idea puts him in such a good mood that he manages to organise his dinner date without a hint of irritation and indeed so much bad-boy charm and suavity that the organiser is left weak at the knees, and then bounces off to the morgue full of satisfaction, tinged with a certain degree of _that’ll show her I’m desirable_. 

Lanie is intrigued to see Castle, especially as she knows that Kate is on her not-quite-enforced leave and that therefore Castle shouldn’t really be around at all.  Still, he’s good to look at – certainly a better view than the bodies on the slabs.  She’s not going to take up Kate’s suggestion that she pinch his butt, though.  She likes living, with a full complement of limbs and brain.  Also it’s not professional.  She’s always wholly professional, at work.

“Hey, Castle.  What are you doing round here when there’s no new body?”

“I ran out of inspiration.  So I went to the precinct but they’re only doing paperwork.  So I thought I’d come here and ask you about morgue procedure and being an ME.”  He waggles his list of questions as proof of good faith.

“So just because you can’t trail round after Beckett you’ve come to annoy me?”  But Lanie’s smiling and clearly not annoyed at all.  Castle makes a thwarted-child face.

“She didn’t tell me she wouldn’t be in work.  I wanted to ask her about all the processes you have to go through to be a cop.  Ryan and Espo both got in through different routes.  I need to know how she did it for Nikki Heat.”  Lanie looks at him sceptically.

“Yeah, sure, Writer-Boy.  And the chance to sit and flirt and show off all day never entered your head.”

“Secondary consideration,” says Castle airily.  Lanie blows a raspberry at him.

“Bullshit.  I’ve seen how you look at Beckett.  And how close you stand.  How come she’s not killed you already?”  Castle smirks.

“I’m just lovable.  It would be like shooting a puppy.”  Lanie is unimpressed.

“Riigghht.”  She picks up a scalpel.  “Don’t believe you.  What’s going on?”

Castle is rapidly coming to the conclusion that Lanie is actively dangerous.  What _is_ it with the women in the team?  They’re all frighteningly formidable.  If he isn’t to be dead within ten seconds  of the next time Beckett talks to Lanie, he’d better get it together.

“I’m working on convincing her.”

“Of what?  That the Earth is flat?”  Castle winces.

“C’mon, Lanie.  That I’m useful.”  Lanie slices open her corpse and Castle peers at it interestedly.

“What happened?”

“GSW to the chest, see here?  Never had a chance.”  She extracts the bullet and inspects it carefully.  “.38.”  She bags it up and labels it, then goes back to poking around.

“Can you open him right up?  I’ve never seen a whole autopsy.”  Castle’s been distracted from his other goal, being some careful information extraction from Lanie, by the exciting prospect of a full autopsy, possibly incorporating organ removal and dissection, the measurement of the human large intestine, and the analysis of stomach contents.  If he’s really lucky, he’ll get to see the brain removed.

“No.  This is not a spectator sport.”  Castle whines, but rapidly desists when Lanie produces a Beckett-strength glare.

“Okay, Castle, cut out the chit-chat.  Why are you really here?” He opens his mouth to say _I told you_ and Lanie snaps, “And don’t give me that bull about ME procedures.”  It only takes her a second to work it out.  “You want to know about Beckett, don’t you?  And you think you can weasel it out of me?”  She looks like she’s going to autopsy him – in vivo.

“Well…” Castle stutters.  Lanie lets him hang for a moment, watching him gibbering.  Then she grins widely.

“You really are easy, aren’t you?”  Castle pouts at her.  “Very cute, Writer-Boy.  It won’t work on me.  Why don’t you just start by telling me why you think I’d tell you anything at all about Beckett?”

“Because you wouldn’t let her stand me up.”  Lanie’s mouth falls open unattractively.  “So you must have had a reason.  Ergo, you’re plotting.”

“How did you know that I wouldn’t let her stand you up?”  Lanie doesn’t dignify the last sentence with an answer.  Even if it’s absolutely true.  Castle’s ego doesn’t need inflating.  It’s a miracle he can get it through the door.

“Beckett let it slip.”  _That must have improved dinner_ , thinks Lanie.  _No wonder they can’t get it on if that’s the standard of conversation._   Not for the first or last time, Lanie wonders if her friend is actually mentally deficient when it comes to relationships.  Here is a man who’s just what she likes: big, powerful, intelligent (mostly), and good-looking, (and it doesn’t hurt that he’s rich, either.  Lanie is intensely practical.) who’s made it blindingly obvious that he’s really, really interested, and Kate’s treating him as if he’s a stray dog with fleas.

In fact, Lanie thinks, what Kate needs is a little friendly _help._   She’s on the highway to burnout at breakneck speed, she never has any fun – until Writer-Boy here turned up – and she hasn’t had a boyfriend since Sorensen left.  Lanie’s not even sure she’s had a booty call.  Probably not.  Kate’s pretty selective.  To the point of selecting so carefully that the line-up’s non-existent.  Lanie weighs Kate’s accelerating route to burnout – and the tailor-made solution standing right opposite her – against their friendship and decides that friendship requires her to intervene.

“What do you already know, Writer-Boy?  You’ve hung around long enough and you’re so nosy that you’ve found out something.”

“She told me about her mother.  And her father.”  Lanie gapes like a goldfish and swears comprehensively under her breath.  “Then she told me a bit about Kiev, and Russia.  She’s been a model.  She mainlines coffee and she never goes off the job.  She _sleeps_ in the precinct, sometimes.”

“How’d you know that?”

“Saw her.”  Castle chops that off short.  “She never talks about anything at all except by mistake, though, never accepts any help.”  He pauses, reads Lanie’s body language entirely accurately, and says, “She’s the best cop in the precinct and she’s heading for burnout as fast as she can drive.”

“So you noticed.”

“Yeah.  Not hard to notice.  It’s always easy to spot obsession.”  He pauses, thinks a moment, decides that he has to go all in and trust Lanie.  Only with certain things, though.  Not with everything.  “What’s she trying to forget?  Why’d she go completely out of it when Danse Macabre came on the radio?”  And the key question.  “Why won’t she let anyone in?”

Lanie just stares at him.  Eventually she speaks.  “What the hell?”  Then she recovers her normal pace and starts talking at him with machine-gun rapidity.  “When did you start paying so much attention?  You come off like you’re Mr Spoilt Rich Boy with an ego the size of Texas and spend all your time showing off and flirting with her and somehow you’ve read her this well too?”  She draws a quick breath and carries on.  “How do you know all this anyway?  Beckett never talks about anything.  How come she’s talking to you?”  She runs out of the second wind and looks at him very carefully indeed.  She’s not done that before, mainly because she’s been too busy watching Kate’s reactions to him.  Hmm.  He’s ripped, under those jackets, and after that little display he’s coming across as a lot more intelligent and a _lot_ tougher than she’d have expected.  Practically perfect in every way, for Kate.

Castle shrugs.  He’s called on most of his extensive acting ability to hide the true state of matters between Beckett and himself and anything other than his happy-go-lucky precinct persona.  He’s very, very sure that allowing Lanie to guess at the real deal – which she will undoubtedly get right – will result in his sudden and painful death.  It’s up to Beckett what she tells Lanie.  And anyway, he still has absolutely no idea how to describe what they are.

“I’m very personable.  Lots of people talk to me.  It’s how I research.   I ask questions and everyone answers.”  He grins cockily.  Lanie glares.

“I don’t hafta answer, Writer-Boy.  Not if you’re planning on hurting my girl.”

“No.  I’m not planning on that.  Come on, Lanie.  What’s going on?”

“She needs someone to take her mind off the job.”   Lanie’s treading a very careful line.  Kate’s secrets are Kate’s to tell, not Lanie’s.  And Lanie hasn’t missed that Kate hasn’t let Castle know her given name, either.  Lanie assumes that it’s to wind him up, and she’s not going to spoil Kate’s fun.  “So it might as well be you.  She’s working too hard and she needs a break.  She always works too hard, ‘cause of her mom.”  It’s nothing that Castle doesn’t already know, Lanie rationalises.  “So I think she needs some fun.”  Lanie develops a lubricious tone and wriggles her eyebrows meaningfully.  “Can you give her that, big boy?”

 _Oh yes_ , thinks Castle.  _Oh yes.  Any chance I get_.

“Anyway,” Lanie continues, “she’s taking a couple of days because this last case was a bit gruesome and she hasn’t taken a day off in months.  She’s probably gone shoe shopping.”  Again, Lanie can’t imagine that the metrosexual Castle hasn’t noticed Beckett’s extensive shoe collection.  “She might like some company, later.”

Castle raises a wolfish eyebrow.  “Are you suggesting I should go round and see Beckett?  I’m wounded.  I thought you liked me, Lanie.  She’ll shoot me if I go round uninvited.”

“Doubt it,” Lanie mutters, _almost_ entirely under her breath, and then louder, “She’ll likely be home by seven.”

And Lanie having put the idea into his head, he doesn’t even try to remove it.  Which is why, at seven, he’s raising his hand to Beckett’s door.


	45. Take it easy

Beckett has taken her lovely new Ferragamos home and placed them reverently at the front of her shrine to the goddess of sex-soaked shoes, where she can see them instantly every time she opens the closet.  She’ll wear them later, round the apartment, so they become comfy.  Her fingers trail lightly over them: almost a stroke.  She closes the door reluctantly, and meanders off to make herself a coffee and consider the remains of the day.  It’s mid-afternoon and it’s too late to go to one of the museums.  She’ll do that tomorrow.  Maybe the Metropolitan, maybe MOMA, maybe somewhere else.  She could even just ride the Staten Island ferry all day.  Or cook.

Now there’s a plan.  She doesn’t acknowledge that she’d been just a little stung by Castle’s obvious assumption that she not only doesn’t, but _can’t_ , cook, and a little more stung by the fact that he obviously can, and does.  But the more she thinks about it, the more cooking her dinner tonight and tomorrow sounds like an enjoyable pursuit.  Right.  She peruses her limited selection of recipes and decides on a marinated chicken dish and a vanilla and black cherry cheesecake.  Tomorrow she can have it cold, and the cheesecake’s large enough to last a few days.  She’ll go out and get the ingredients, leave the chicken soaking in its spices; she’ll make the cheesecake and then take off for a run, which she also hasn’t done for too long – she’s been sparring for exercise, but suddenly she wants the flex and stretch, the rhythmic movement and the smooth flow of a long run at easy pace – and once she’s back the chicken will be done and her dessert chilled.  Perfect.  All beautifully organised and regulated.  Even relaxing.

It all takes a little longer than she’d thought it would, not that it matters, and by the time she’s back from her running, shorts and sport tank damp from exertion and socks and shoes off, it’s almost seven.  It’s occupied the rest of the day, that’s for sure, and by the time she’s cleaned up and put her dinner out and chosen a book to read while eating, and after, the day will be done.  She might even go to bed at a reasonable hour. (and not dream of the dead when she does)  Lanie had been right, (dammit!) she’d needed this, and tomorrow.  Suddenly the following day off doesn’t seem such a bad thing.

She’s just taken the first steps towards the goal of a hot bath to soothe her muscles: despite careful warm up and cool down they’re protesting at the unaccustomed nature of her exercise, by turning on the taps and adding in a substantial squeeze of muscle relaxant when there’s a knock on the door.  Her first thought is _Not now!_   She’d just started to daydream about the not-quite scaldingly hot water heating her up, the smooth glide of the creamy soap stroking over her wet body, the rough rub and rasp of the loofah across her delicate skin, all too similar to the scrape of stubble.  Her bath would have been a wholly sensuous experience, and she might well have taken it further, relaxed herself fully, and then finished with her favourite moisturiser, gently massaged in.

And someone’s spoiled it, and with that, her mood.  She’s profoundly irritated with whoever it is.  She opens the door, scowling blackly.

“Oh,” she says utterly discouragingly.  “It’s you.  What do you want?”

Castle simply, slowly looks her up and down with heat and hunger growing rampant on his face, takes one step inside the door and crashes down on her lips, kicking the door shut behind him.  Beckett’s surprised squawk is lost in his forceful invasion as he plunders her mouth, sure, searching and deep.  When he finally lifts off she stares at him.

“Most people just say hello, Castle.” But there’s more breathlessness than snark in the comment, and she isn’t pulling out of his hard grip.

“Most people aren’t wearing teeny-tiny shorts and something that looks like an only marginally oversized sports bra when they open the door, either.”  He runs his palm over the exposed skin between the two garments, and she shudders.

“I went running.”  Suddenly she tugs away from him.  “My bath!”  She dashes for the bathroom to turn it off before she floods the place and the apartment below.  Castle drops his jacket on the couch and follows.  He hadn’t precisely meant to greet Beckett like that.  Well, he hadn’t meant to do that at all, in fact.  But she’s barely dressed, compared to what he usually sees her wearing, and she’s ruffled and sweaty and poured into her running gear and she’s so close to how she looks just before and during and after he takes her that it went straight to his hindbrain.  The thought of her in a bath, naked and languorously soaping herself, isn’t doing much for his self-control either. 

When he reaches the bathroom Beckett’s examining a full, but not yet flooded, bath with some disfavour, swishing her fingers through the water.

“What’s wrong, Beckett?”  She pulls her full lower lip through her teeth.

“My bath.  I guess I’ll have to drain it.”

“Why?”  She turns a glare on him that screams _Are you always this dumb or do you save it specially for me?_

“Because you’ve shown up.  By the time you’ve told me whatever your reason for turning up here is, and left again, it won’t be hot any more.”  She scowls at him some more.

“Really?” murmurs Castle with just an edge of danger.  He moves up close.  “I’m sorry about that,” he husks into her ear.  She starts at his nearness.  “I’ve got a solution, though.”  And he picks her up and dangles her, still clothed, over the bath.  “There.”

“ _What the hell are you doing_?” Beckett screeches.  Castle smiles very slowly and wickedly, lowering her closer and closer to the water.

“Giving you your bath,” he says with saintly innocence.  He doesn’t add _Because you want your bath and I want to give you everything you want._   Nor does he add _Because I can’t stand not having you._   In any sense.  Nor yet does he add _Because you’re mine._   But all of them are true.

“I can wash myself.  I’m not three.”  But the idea wriggles up and down her nerves and concentrates itself between her legs.  He’s still holding her over the water, about an inch above soaking her.  “I’ve still got my clothes on.”  It’s more of a challenge than an objection.

“That could be changed,” Castle rasps, as he puts her back on her feet, wraps her against him.  “You shouldn’t be dressed, if you’re having a bath.”

“No,” Beckett murmurs.  “I shouldn’t.”  Her tone is an invitation.

“We can change that,” he whispers.  “But first, shall I kiss you again?”  She nods slowly; leans towards him, and he takes her mouth with his in a slow, deep, drugging kiss that leaves them both breathing harder. 

 “More?”  She has to agree.  Every step of the way, she needs to consent.  He’s angry with himself, underneath, that he couldn’t control himself when she opened the door, didn’t wait.  Couldn’t wait, when he hadn’t seen or touched her since Friday.  Seeing her, touching her, seemed – seems - as necessary as breathing. 

“More,” she breathes out, as whisper-soft as silk, and he kisses her again, as gently as that same silk might slide around her and over her and tie her to him. 

“Time to get ready for your bath, Beckett.”  His fingers slide slowly over her back to reach the lower rim of the tank.  He peels it from her skin, rolls it up and over her head to leave her naked from the waist up, leans back in and kisses her again in a leisurely way, taking his time till she’s making soft noises and her hands are gripping his neck to hold him firmly in place, chest pressed against her.  This time when they separate he unbuttons his own shirt, takes it off and turns to put it out the way of any stray splashes, returns to his position.  He’s not wearing a tee under the shirt.  Beckett reaches one slim finger into the bath and paints his right pectoral with a drip of water, watches it slide slowly down, follows it delicately with the tip of her tongue. When she speaks her voice laps against him as softly as the bathwater might.

“I thought you promised to bathe me, Castle.  Did you get distracted?”

“No.  I can concentrate, when there’s something to concentrate on.”  His eyes are midnight dark, intent.  “And right now I have someone to concentrate on.”  He runs the hand on her shoulder down a little, drops into that distilled-desire voice that dances down her.  “Are you ready for your bath, Beckett?”  And she knows he doesn’t mean ready for the soap by his hand.  She looks up through her lashes, and her gaze is sultry.

“What are you waiting for?”

“Baths should be slow,” and he’s sliding hands over her back and downward to the waistband of her shorts, kissing feather-light downward over her stomach as he slowly rolls her shorts and with them her panties down her legs till she’s naked and he’s knelt at her feet.  He stands again, pulls her against him and holds her right where he wants her with a large palm over her ass.  She rolls into him and he takes her mouth fast and just a little rough, showing her what he wants, knowing it’s what she likes: promises for a darker game, later.

And when he thinks she’s suitably unsuspicious, he whisks her up into his arms, bends down and plops her into the bath, sending a minor tsunami over the edge.  She resurfaces, sleek and dripping, and splutters wrathfully at him, not relaxed at all.

“What did you do that for?  I’m soaked!”

 “Oh, I know that you’re soaking wet, Beckett.”  He kneels down on the bathmat and leans on the rim of the bath.

“So is my floor.  Are you going to clear up the mess you just made?”  Castle runs his gaze over her so that she can see the desire flickering darkly in his eyes.

“I haven’t even started to make a mess.  But wouldn’t it be nicer if I finished what I’ve started?”  Heat flares in his eyes, and answers in her face.  “I’ve started by getting you all wet.”

“Yeah, by dropping me in a bath.  Full of water.  That tends to get people wet.”

“Very true.  So it won’t matter if you get wetter, will it?”  His tone is lower, darker, and rasps along her skin.  “That’s what a bath’s for.  Getting you all wet.”  He runs a finger over her cheek, flirts it along her jaw, leans closer.  “Do you like baths when you’re feeling dirty, Detective?”  A flare of colour washes along her cheekbones, unspoken confession.  The finger strokes down the tendon in her neck, floats over her collarbone, pauses between her clavicles briefly, slides along the other collarbone and comes to rest on her bare shoulder, outlining small circles.  The position prisons her against the end of the bathtub, with no way to move out of the cage of Castle’s arm without sinking under the water.  Her eyes darken and she bites down on her lip.

 “You need to relax.  Let yourself go.  Let the bath wash over you.”  He’s murmuring, words slipping over her as easily as the water, and it doesn’t matter what he’s saying because all she hears is the soft tone of seduction and the notes his fingers are playing at the edge of the water.

He shifts round to be behind her.  “Lean forward, Beckett, so I can wash your back.”  She slides a little forward, bends a touch.  He glides the soap over her back, and when she’s slippery with lather replaces it with his hands and begins to massage her shoulders, strong fingers and thumbs working out knots and tensions from her neck to the small of her back, under the water.  She hums contentedly, pushing into his movements.  “Like that?”

“Mmmm.”  He stops, and she makes a discontented noise until he returns with the soap and begins to minister to her front in the same way.  The hum takes on a different note.  When he washes each leg, pressing thumbs into the arch of each foot, the hum is distinctly breathless.  And then he stops.

Castle sits back on his heels, watching her.  “Now, Beckett.  I don’t think you’re quite clean yet.  In fact, I think you’re still very, very dirty.”  He pushes her gently back against the end of the bath, down so that she’s half lying, head on the rim, and kisses her.  His hand slips down under the water and across her stomach, glides over her hip, ends in the soft folds between her legs and she gasps into his mouth.  “Amazing how wet a bath can make you, Beckett.”  His fingers dance over her and she moans and tries to wriggle in the limited confines of the tub.

“I’ll relax you.  Just let go, let me take charge.  Isn’t that what you want?”  He touches her more demandingly.  “Isn’t it?”   She nods.  “Use your words, Beckett.  Is it what you want?”

“Ye-es,” she replies, on a long exhale, and then capitulates to her own needs.  “Relax me, Castle.”  He returns to slow, demanding kisses; slow, demanding strokes; tongue and fingers moving in synchronised patterns to play her to his beat, gradually speeding it up and never moving off her mouth.  This isn’t about admissions, confessions, or demands that she let him own her.  All of those can wait.  This is about _taking_ _care_ of her, without her noticing, without her realising.  She needs to take a break, she needs some fun, she needs to relax.  And she’s asked him to make it happen.  She’s asked him to help her, and she doesn’t even realise it.    Another tiny, tiny step in the right direction; another tiny, tiny step towards him.  He keeps one hand around her ribs, holding her firmly in place,  above the water (drowning is a bad plan, he feels) and slides hard fingers across her and into her and over a spot which makes her writhe and push into his hand as he does it again, and again; thrust of tongue matching thrust of fingers until she twists and writhes and he brings his thumb over that most sensitive spot so she arches and screams into his kiss and comes.  Castle pulls her against his chest to keep her close in what is becoming the familiar, disturbingly welcome hold.

* * *

 

Much later, lying utterly relaxed across her now thoroughly rumpled bed – well, sprawled across Castle, who as usual is refusing to let go of her and who is stretched across her bed - Beckett remembers that she’d intended to eat.

“ ‘M hungry.  I want some dinner.”  Castle rumbles something into her hair that doesn’t really seem to advance matters.  Beckett tries to sit up.  Castle tugs her back down.  “Castle, I’m hungry.  Let go, please.”

“Don’t wanna.  Mine,” he says, possessively.  The tone catches Beckett wrongly.  She’s spent the last hour at his mercy and every time he’d brought her close to the edge he’d claimed her as his and she’d agreed.  She tells herself, with a total lack of truth, that she’s tired of that scenario and wishes he’d stop this assumption of ownership.  It’s just a game. A very attractive game, but a game.  She needs to move away from his assumptions before she starts to like them far too much.  Before she starts to think they might be real; that it means more to him than it does; before she has to realise that she’s so far past her boundaries that they’re on the dark side of the moon.  Her own completely unacknowledged hypocrisy does nothing to improve her mood at being thwarted.

“Let.  Go,” she says, the snap of her precinct command in her voice.  Castle, still hazed in afterglow and Beckett’s intoxicating presence, unfortunately doesn’t pick up her full meaning.

“Wouldn’t it be nicer staying right here?” he entices, loosening his arms too little for Beckett’s taste.  She shoves hard against his chest.

“Let.  Go.  Now.”  Her tone finally penetrates.  Castle opens his arms immediately and Beckett is off the bed and stalking to the bathroom before his hands fall back to the mattress.  During her clean up, she realises just what she’d said while they were enjoying her bath.  It appals her to know that she’d, however subtly, asked for help.  She adds it to her idiotic request to him a week ago to make her forget, and comes up with a total she doesn’t much like.  She’s getting far too used to asking him for support.  Twice is twice too many.  She adds in how she’s leaning on him for comfort, how she’s stopped objecting to the protective, possessive grip, and comes up with a total she hates: she’s letting herself, and him, think he can take care of her.

She’d thought about asking him to stay for dinner: there’s enough food, but now she thinks that’s far too domestic, too much like a real relationship, too close to something she isn’t capable of and that he’s said he doesn’t want.  It’ll only end in tears, when he finds out about her past, sees her as a victim.  He’s halfway there already.  Just like Sorenson had seen her as a victim, and not treated her as an equal because of it: not listened to her, or her team; followed up with jealousy because another man treated her equally, and because of that everything had gone south.  Poor Kate, had been his attitude, you’ve experienced such a trauma, better protect you, better take care of you, better take you away from the job you’re so good at because you shouldn’t be reminded of the past.  Better stop you reopening the wound every time you close a case.  Except the only thing that healed her was closing other people’s cases, and taking her away from that would have reopened her wounds every time she saw someone else’s shield and gun.  Poor broken Kate, still a victim.  Six years after she’d been a victim, when Sorenson had found out her story – _be truthful now, Kate, when you told him your story_ – all he’d seen was a victim.  He’d ignored everything else, believed that as a victim she couldn’t make the right decisions for herself.

She’s not blind, or stupid.  She’s seen the boys’ sidelong glances, at the end of a long day; she’s seen Montgomery bite his tongue; she’s heard Lanie’s forthright views.  Every time she sees her father, every time she remembers how he spiralled into alcohol and victimhood, every time she censors what she says to him so she doesn’t ever risk sending him back down that spiral again, she vows that she isn’t a victim.

Every case she closes lets her think that she can make a difference to these others, when she couldn’t for herself.  Every case she works, she’s not the victim, either the dead victim or those still living.  She’s the solution, not the problem.  She doesn’t see that her whole sense of self, her whole assurance, is bound up in solving the case.  She thinks it’s dedication; those around her see that it’s self-sacrifice: in truth it’s only half a step away from self-destruction.

All her time in therapy, all her hard, bright intelligence, all the compassion and the empathy she turns on to the friends and relatives of the dead, and she still hasn’t learned the difference between support and suffocation; between comfort and control; between being a victim and being human. 

She considers the last three weeks and decides that she hasn’t kept within her boundaries, hasn’t kept herself safe, can see the cliff of relying on someone else coming up fast.  She looks coldly back and sees clearly her self-deceptive manoeuvres to keep herself from realising what she was doing: letting Castle take care of her.  And then, instead of analysing why she had allowed herself to do that; instead of considering whether she should re-evaluate her boundaries, or scrap them entirely; instead of looking at the way she already trusts Castle, in the precinct and out; instead of realising that he already knows the basic story and hasn’t treated her in the slightest bit differently because of it – instead, she decides, in one of the stupidest decisions she could possibly have made in ten years of stupid decisions about dealing with people outside the job, that it’s time to push this all back into a neatly delineated box and go back to her careful, controlled life while she still can; before she starts looking for something that’s not on offer.  She knows exactly how to make it happen.  She’ll ask him to go home, nicely and politely, and then she can think clearly for the rest of the evening and sort out what she’s going to do about it.  Him.  What she’s going to do about him.  And then they can have an adult discussion about it.

She finishes cleaning up, puts on a resolutely unattractive robe, and emerges.  As she reappears her shell is in place and her eyes are shuttered and cool.  There’s no hint of the softness she’d displayed earlier, no reminder that she’d stood clasped in his arms and taken strength from it.  She can’t rely on anyone but herself and, only at work, her team: everything else passes through. 

“It’s getting late, Castle.  Don’t you need to go home for dinner?  Won’t your family be expecting you back?” she says pleasantly, smiles, and turns away from the bathroom door towards the main room as he sits up to give him some time to clean up.


	46. You don't mean a single word you say

“Sorry?”

“Don’t you need to go home for dinner?  You always make sure you’re home for Alexis.” Beckett repeats, still pleasantly; no more intensity of emotion than if he were the plumber who’s finished fixing a dripping faucet. Castle doesn’t understand why she’s shut down again.

“But…”

“It’s getting late.”  She thinks she’d better explain.   She hadn’t meant to be brusque, or to upset him.  She just needs some time.  Alone.  She’s not going to lose it like she did the other night: she’s going to be adult, and civilised, and explain that, and it’ll all be okay.  “I need some space for a bit, and I thought your family would be expecting you home.  We can talk tomorrow, if you like.   Or I’ll see you in the precinct on Wednesday, won’t I?  I had to take a couple of personal days, after the last case.”  It’s the tone of pleasant reasonableness that flicks him on the raw every time.  He looks for an instant as if she’s kicked his puppy: hurt gleaming in his blue eyes.  Then he changes.

“Okay, Beckett, what is it this time?  I haven’t asked you anything, so you can’t claim I’m pushing you.  I haven’t tried to ask you to my loft, so it’s not that you might have to make nice with my family, or put up with their enthusiasm, which you clearly hate.  I haven’t mentioned anything to do with the precinct, so I’m not siccing Montgomery on you.  I haven’t tried to give you anything” – bitterness spills out his mouth – “not even _your_ dress back, so you can’t say I’m offering charity.  So what’s your problem?”

“No problem.  If you don’t want to meet tomorrow, I’ll see you in the precinct Wednesday.  I need some down time from the case, okay?  I need some time to sort myself out.  So I need some space.”  Same reasonable tone, same result.  Castle starts to lose his temper.

“Fine.  Have it your own way.  When you get round to telling some truth for a change, let me know.  Because what you just said is crap.  You can start with what you really want, then go on to why you nearly fainted on hearing Danse Macabre; and follow up with what your problem is with talking about any issue at all.  You just can’t accept anything from anyone, can you?  No wonder you don’t have a life outside murder.  You don’t want one.  You’re too scared to get out your own little comfort zone and get a life.  What’s it like hanging out in the demilitarised zone, Beckett?  You got a nice life there?”  And now he’s completely lost his cool.  He is sick of this.

She’d tried to do this nicely, she’d tried to explain that she needed some space, and now he won’t listen when she says she needs it.  Her own temper flares in response to his, and suddenly it’s all gone to hell again.

“Like your life, Castle?  Parties and alcohol and signing chests?  At least I do something worthwhile with my life.” 

“Sure you do.  Twenty-four/seven, no breaks, no friends.  I’ve got a nice life, too, and I don’t spend every second of it martyring myself.  That’s why I’ve got a nice dinner date on Wednesday with a woman who’ll behave like a civilised human being.”  He doesn’t think about what he’s saying, but he means to hurt, and it hits her like a pile-driver.

“Still sleeping with any woman who’s dumb enough to say yes to you.”  It’s not a question.  He’s flicked her temper to full on, and all her good intentions have disintegrated.

“Like you were?”  And there he’s lit the last straw, flaming into ashes.

“Yeah, well.  We all make mistakes.  You kept chasing for longer than I thought you would.  It was easier just to say yes.  That way you’d be done with me sooner.”  Castle’s eyes narrow with fury.

“That’s all this has been to you?  A quick fuck whenever you don’t feel like switching on your toys?  God, you’re good.”  Sarcasm coats every letter.  “You’re a better actress than my mother.  All that “It was my mother not my father” was just a line, wasn’t it?”  He draws an acid breath. “You’re just another groupie.  Better at the game than most, but just another groupie.  Did it make you happy to have me chasing you, to be the one who caught me?  How you must have laughed.”

She’s white.  “My mother is _dead_.  If you think that was just a line, fine.  I don’t care.  I didn’t want you chasing me and I don’t want to catch you.  It’s not worth it.”  Clearly he didn’t think she was worth it, she means.  He’s already lined up the next conquest.

“You’re just another arrogant playboy with a fat wallet, only wanting what you can’t have.  You were only interested till you got me and now you’re off to someone else.  Seen plenty of that, don’t need to see any more.  You got nothing more to recommend you than any other, just a different set of lines and better timing.  Don’t pretend you care, Castle, because we both know it isn’t so.  You only cared about the chase, and that’s done.  You got what you wanted and now you’re done.  You’ve found another conquest.  Fine.  I’m done.” 

She turns away to the bathroom door.  Once she shuts it, he can dress and leave without her seeing him.  Without him seeing her.  Once she shuts it, she can collapse.  She’d tried to be nice, and polite, and get some space in a civilised fashion, and it hadn’t worked: he wouldn’t give her it.  So now she’ll have made him go, though she didn’t even have to do that, since he’d clearly decided to move on, and she won’t even have to deal with any of her conflicted thoughts and feelings or decide whether to take any sort of a risk.  She should, she now thinks, have taken him up on his offer to quit a week ago, but she was too much of a coward, too weak to do what she needed to in that moment: she’d reacted with her heart instead of her head.  She’d known right from the start that this moment would come: though she’d thought that he’d walk away earlier. Still, she’ll only need to deal with the lesser pain of that, instead  of needing to make him go before she has to deal with the pain of having something more, and then it breaking on her history.

Castle hears the hard click of the bathroom door shutting and tries to get past the anger and agony of the last five minutes far enough to breathe again and leave.  So.  So that’s all he’d been.  Rick Castle, star, sex toy and unwanted nuisance.  She’d only slept with him so he’d go away.  He’d have thought she’d have wanted to watch her triumph, watch him leave with his tail between his legs.  He gets off the bed heavily and finds his clothes, dresses, realises that his shirt is still in the bathroom.  He’ll need to face her to retrieve it.  Well, he can do that.  If she doesn’t want him, it’s her loss.  Plenty other fish in the sea.  Plenty.  Who’ll treat him as he ought to be treated: do anything he wants, any way he wants it. 

He trudges to the door and shoves it open, announcing in hard tones that he’s collecting his shirt.  He can’t see her.  He’s further infuriated when she doesn’t even bother to respond.  He finds his shirt on the vanity where he’d so carefully placed it.  He picks it up, shakes it out and puts it on, buttoning it quickly, anxious only to leave; but when he automatically checks that he’s decent in the mirror he sees Beckett, slumped on the floor with her back to the wall and her head on her knees, in exactly the same defensive, self-protecting position as she’d been when he found her in the gym after yet another shattering fight, hiding in the shadow of the door where he wouldn’t otherwise have seen her.

Hiding from him, again.

She doesn’t look as if she’s happy with the situation: none of the triumph that her vicious, biting words should have induced.  She’s getting exactly what she’d said she wanted: him leaving, and she should be happy with that.  Except she’s sitting on the floor of the bathroom looking utterly devastated and hiding.  Castle’s well-developed instinct for spotting evasions, untruths and downright lies, learned in the hard school of theatre and honed to a fine edge by the publishing industry and success, kicks into high gear.  He’s utterly failed to remember how the fight really got going: that he said he was going out on a date with someone else.

“You set that situation up deliberately,” he says conversationally.  Only cold, unhappy silence replies.  “You staged it, right from the very first word.  Right from asking me to go home as if I were the plumber.”

More cold, unhappy silence. 

“So I’m going to stay here till you tell me why.  Because suddenly I don’t believe a single word that you’ve said in the last ten minutes.  I’m not one of your lap-dogs who you can throw back to the dog-pound when you can’t cope any more.  You can stop trying to bait me into losing my temper and walking away without you having to tell a word of truth.  I’m not one of the idiots on whom it’s worked in the past.”  Still silence, still the icy cold.  Beckett hasn’t shifted an inch. 

“I’m not leaving till I get some truthful answers.  You can’t sit in here for ever.  I’m going to make some dinner and wait till you come out.  If you haven’t come out by the time it’s ready I’ll come in and get you.  We are not doing this your way.”  It’s the hard, intimidating Castle who hadn’t hesitated to take her down in sparring as soon as he thought he could win, not the amiable man who normally inhabits the precinct, or the sensually dominating man that appears in the bedroom.

“You’re nothing but a coward, Beckett.  You don’t even have the guts to tell me the truth.  Well, you’re going to have to.  You can damn well explain what the hell is going on here, because I don’t have a clue.”

He walks out of the bathroom, leaving Beckett still sitting exactly where she had been.  _He_ doesn’t have a clue?  He’s the one who’d lost his temper and he’s the one who’s moving on to someone else.  Shortly she hears the fridge opening, a soft whistle-note of surprise, the fridge closing to a rattle of dishes, and the oven opening and closing.  She doesn’t move.  She hears the clink of glasses, the rattle of cutlery, the soft pop of a cork leaving a bottle. 

She leaves the bathroom for the comfort of her bedroom, automatically straightens up the comforter and curls miserably into the pillows.  Shortly thereafter she hears Castle’s tones on the phone.  She can’t distinguish the words.  She doesn’t care.  She’d tried to explain politely that she needed some space and he wouldn’t listen.  He’s found a new interest and this was nothing more than a farewell fuck.  For as long as she doesn’t come out she can still believe that he’ll leave without needing to look at him again.  She’s not crying.  She doesn’t cry, when people leave her.  Not for ten years.

Because up till now she’s always wanted them to go.

Castle mechanically goes through the familiar motions of preparing dinner, surprised to find real food in the fridge, setting the table and, since he finds it there, opening a bottle of wine.  He needs some.  The chicken will take around a half-hour, which gives him time to think.  He’s certain Beckett won’t emerge of her own volition.  He’s angry enough at her to use his size and strength simply to manhandle her out of there.  He’s got every right to be angry, he thinks, but he needs to channel it into eliciting some answers.  The small domestic matters calm him, as always.  But still.  She doesn’t _get_ to look at what they can be and ditch it with lies and evasions: run away and hide.  If she doesn’t want it, she can say so in plain words, and look him in the eye while she does it.  Like she’d done with the dress.

Like she’d done with the dress.  When she’d been furiously angry, and genuinely had not wanted his _charity_ (as she’d called it) at all, and had come to his loft, faced him down, looked him in the eye and thrown it at him, and marched away with not a backward glance.  There hadn’t been the slightest hint of misery, just raw fury and total honesty.  So why doesn’t she have the same guts now?

He sits back and applies a formidable mind in one direction.  Clark Murray would have been very interested to see the difference in his friend when he does target his intelligence.  It is, indeed, very effective.

This time there’d been no honesty, not a lot of anger, more sarcastic resignation, until he’d accused her of using her mother’s death as a line, and plenty of misery.  He analyses what _she’d_ said as if it were an English assignment in college, tone, intonation, word choice.  She’d used a pleasant, reasonable tone, and asked him nicely to leave, because she needed some space.  Which is where this all went wrong.  Because she couldn’t possibly have known how those words would hit him.   So he’d lashed out.  He doesn’t remember exactly what _he_ said, but he’d lost his temper and he’d intended to force some truth out her.

But she was lying.  He knows that.  But… only _after_ he’d lost his temper had she lost hers.  She’d implied that he was nothing more than his PR has made him out to be, which she knows will hurt him – in fact, she’d pushed all his buttons.  He admires, in a bitter way, how well she can pull his triggers; how well she’d fired them all and how that had burned him into making searing replies that he’d never have given if she hadn’t tuned him up first.  He wonders how it is that they can hurt each other so quickly, so deeply.  He wonders more strongly why she feels the need to push him away, keep him at a distance, when it very clearly isn’t what she wants – if it were, she wouldn’t let him into her bed, she wouldn’t have let him back into the precinct.  And so he focuses his intelligence very specifically on when she hides, on when she runs away, on every time she’s backed off, and when he’s finished that, he’s seen the pattern clearly.  He’d seen it, not quite so clearly, a week ago.  It’s exactly the same as a week ago.  She’d realised she’d admitted she needed something from him – forgetfulness, or _relaxation_ – which he thinks might also involve forgetfulness – and she’d tried to push it all away.  But this time he hadn’t pushed at all.  He’d stuck to letting her set the pace: he’d left her alone when she’d wanted it, on Friday – seemed to want it.  He’d only come round tonight because Lanie had suggested it. 

He smiles, edgily, into Beckett’s rather good wine.  He sees her very clearly, now.  This time he hadn’t pushed, and she’s still admitted a need, and then she’s realised and then she’s spooked.  And she’s pushing him away so she can stop fighting herself.  He’s not just winning, he’s as good as won.  Beckett’s fighting a last-ditch, rearguard action – and she’d very, very nearly pulled it off.  If he hadn’t lost his temper, if his shirt hadn’t still been in the bathroom, if he hadn’t spotted her in the mirror – on such small horseshoe nails are victories built.  He takes a celebratory sip of the wine, and leans back, dropping his layers, his masks.

He’s fought for everything he now has: success, money, his family, his life.  Now he’s going to fight for Beckett.  The only difference is that before he was fighting external influences: this time he’s fighting her demons, and she’s leading them in the charge.  They are going to sort this out, once and for all.

It dawns on him, rather more slowly than he would have liked, that he might have seen Beckett’s pattern but he doesn’t understand her motivation for that pattern.  He can see that a hot female cop might have some difficulties in being taken seriously along the way, but that doesn’t seem anything like enough for this. Even the massive roadblock that’s the unsolved murder of her mother doesn’t seem wholly to account for the rejection of anything that might, in this world or the next, amount to a smidgeon of help.  Okay, so her father, who should have been there for her, (Castle has very little sympathy for that collapse.  He can’t imagine that he would ever abandon Alexis like that.) hadn’t been, but it still simply does not seem enough.  Very close to enough, but not sufficient.  Not when someone is as strong, as focused, as together as Beckett.

There has to be something else.  Something that finally crowned her kingdom of insecurity with the knowledge that there was no-one who’d support her.  And there’s the word.  _Support_.  What had she said – he doesn’t have to search for that: she’d seared those words across his skull.  _I don’t_ _want someone pretending to take care of me and suffocating me.  I don’t want a relationship._   He should have paid more attention to her wording then.  He’d meant to think about it later, but later hadn’t arrived, till now.  Ah.  That makes everything clear.  It wouldn’t have taken much, given her already fragile background, for a serious, and eventually unsuccessful, relationship, obviously one where someone tried to clip her wings, to give her the idea that all relationships go that way.  He hopes he’ll never meet the idiot, because right now he’d dearly love to deck him, for screwing up his, Castle’s, best hope in years for a long-term affair.

Oh.  Oh.   _Might as well admit it to yourself, then, Rick.  You want a proper relationship._ No wonder she upsets him so.  The last time he thought he had one of those she said she –  _oh hell_ – needed space and never came back.  No wonder he’d reacted so very badly tonight.  His own history, coming back to bite him; coupled with her history, used against him.  A perfect storm of history.  He’d never liked history.  But now, he’d better learn from the mistakes of the past, or be doomed to repeat them.

So.  First, last, and always, the story that’s her mother’s murder, her father’s consequent failure.  But around that, minor sub-plot, the trials of being a female cop; and epilogue, in a twist she didn’t see coming, the serious, failed, relationship that left the story hanging, unresolved.  He doesn’t think that she wouldn’t have tried to get over the murder, he’s sure that by now she’s long overcome the professional challenge.  Esposito and Ryan are proof of that.  So had it not been for the final straw of some asshole who didn’t appreciate her, and her strength, she’d at least be open to some sort of relationship.  Instead she’s still as closed as a prison cell door. 

How to make her see that he has no inclination or desire to restrict her; would never expect her to be anything other than first through the door?  It’s who she is, what she is, and changing that would be like moving Mount Rainier with a teaspoon.  He doesn’t want her to be any different, except open to a relationship with him.  (Not with anyone else.)  All the rest of her… he wouldn’t change a thing.  He sips his wine again, and wonders how best to make that clear.  He takes a brief moment to call home, to say he’ll be late, may not be home for breakfast.  One way or another, he is going to deal with this tonight.  She _will_ tell him the truth.  And then there’ll be an ultimatum.  His, to her.  There’s no more thinking to be done, he just has to be patient till either she emerges or he goes and fetches her.  He borrows a book from her shelves to pass the next few minutes.

The shrill beep of the oven drags him back out the book and to reality: reality being that Beckett hasn’t come out.  He takes the chicken out the oven, but leaves it in its dish to stay warm.  He isn’t at all convinced that Beckett will emerge easily, or without protest.  He isn’t at all convinced that she’ll talk, either.  But he is going to stay here until she does.  However long it takes.  Truth time.

He gets up and strides towards the bathroom, ready to resolve this.  One way or another.

Beckett is not in the bathroom.  Which is quite a good thing, because the bathroom door does actually have a lock, and he’s not prepared to open this discussion by yelling through a locked door.  There’s only one other option, since she didn’t come out: her bedroom.  There she is, buried face down in an assortment of pillows and shrouded in a very unlovely robe.  She’s too rigid to be sleeping.  There is, however, a very suspicious tremor in her shoulders.

“Dinner’s ready.”  Silence.  “Beckett, we are not doing this your way any more.  If you want me gone you have to talk to me first and tell me the truth.”

“Go away.  You’re the one who’s moving on.”  She can’t tell him the truth.  She doesn’t even know what the truth is herself. 

“I’m not moving on.  That’s ridiculous.  You’re the one who keeps running away and hiding.  And I won’t leave until you tell me some truth.” 

Castle sits down on the edge of the bed and waits to see if Beckett will say anything else.  He hasn’t the faintest idea where the statement about him moving on came from, so he simply denies and then ignores it.  When she doesn’t speak again, he decides on more direct measures, picks her up bodily and puts her firmly on his lap, tucking her in.  Tucking her in, of course, has the minor benefit that she can’t hit him and the major one that she’s cuddled against him where he can spot every minor evasion in the tension changes in her body.  The fact that physical contact is the only way they ever seem to connect honestly is also a factor.

“Beckett, we are not going to keep dancing to this music.  If you really wanted rid of me you’d have done it last week when I gave you the chance.  So what’s changed?”  More silence. 

“Okay, if you won’t talk yet I will.  If you’re too scared” – the edge in his voice bites -  “to tell me the truth I’ll tell you it.  You think, on no evidence at all, that I’ll suffocate you if I think you need to be taken care of.  Right?”  Nothing. 

“You think that telling me anything at all will take you somewhere you don’t want to be.”  Still nothing. 

“I told you, I don’t want to take care of you.  You can do that for yourself.  If I wanted someone who needed to be taken care of I wouldn’t choose a cop.  And if you don’t want a relationship that’s still just _fine_.  But stop playing this on-again-off-again game every time something happens that makes you think I’m taking care of you – because I’m not – or you think it might mean something more.  Tell me the truth, instead of hiding behind your temper or running off.  And if you can’t see that – if you won’t tell me the truth - let’s just quit it now.  ‘Cause it doesn’t mean anything more than that.”  It’s as well she can’t see his face.  If she could, she’d know he was lying through his teeth again with that last sentence. 

“I didn’t try to stop you when you were trying to shoot the trafficker.  I didn’t try to stop you when you were talking down the nanny with the knife.  That’s your job.  It’s what you do.  If you think I’ve any intention of complaining that you do your job then you’re wrong.  So what’s it going to be, Beckett?  Trust me, or not?”

Can she?


	47. I don't wanna talk

Can she trust him is not the question.  She knows, already, she _should_ trust him.  He saved her life.  The question is _will_ she, and that’s much harder to answer.  If trust means talking, she can’t do it.  It’s been a disaster every time she’s tried it, and she’s massively unwilling to invite yet another disaster.  But she’s staring the other route to disaster squarely in the face.

“I don’t want to be taken care of.  I can’t cope with it.  I can’t deal with people being too close.  It suffocates me.  I need space.  Can you deal with that, can you let me have space?  You ask questions all the time.  I really, really don’t want to discuss my past.  Can you deal with that?  You keep asking questions about my past.”  She sounds almost frantic.  “If I can’t have space and quiet then I can’t do this.  It won’t work, otherwise.  I can only make this work if I get that.”  She looks as if she’s about to cry.  “It never works, otherwise.  Even though I want it to work.”  The last words are so quiet he barely hears them.

Some truth, at last.  And tap-dance time, Castle thinks, through the minefield he needs to negotiate to keep Beckett.  He is, now, going to keep her.  Nobody gets to push him away when they clearly care.  ( _You have to go away, darling.  It’s the best thing for you_.)  She just said she cared.  She wants this to work.  And because of that extremely convenient truth, he can deal with the inconvenient truth contained in the rest of it, which confirms every thought he’s had earlier.

They’re so obviously right when they’re with each other, here and now, in the precinct and out of it.  It still won’t last for ever, but it’s going to be good for the long time it does, and he’s not letting her make the decisions for both of them without at least getting his two cents worth in and heard. He’s got plenty skin in this game.  Time to dance the high-wire, and hope he doesn’t fall.

“If you don’t want to be taken care of, I won’t take care of you.  I’m not interested in propping up someone who doesn’t want to take care of themselves, anyway.”  That, at least, is the whole truth.  The last thing he ever wants is another Meredith.  “If you don’t wanna talk about things, mostly that’s okay too.  But you don’t get to try to shove me away again without saying why.  If you don’t want this, then fine” – it wouldn’t be fine.  It wouldn’t be fine, but it would be over – “but you have to say why.   You have to stop lying to me.” 

He chooses his next words very carefully to tell the exact truth.  “I won’t discuss your past with you unless you want to.”  Which leaves him still able to investigate her past on his own account, without talking to her about it, which is precisely where he wants to be.  If there’s nothing for Clark to find, then he’s never going to mention it.  It would only hurt her, to raise her hopes and then dash them, and he doesn’t want to do that, ever.  If he finds something, he’s not broken his word.  “Except if I want to know about the Academy, or cop stuff, it’s research, okay, it’s not asking about your past.  I need to know how that works without you thinking I’m over your line.”  He digresses.  “I already asked Esposito and Ryan how they got to be cops, and Lanie’s going to tell me about becoming an ME.”

That’s oddly reassuring.  If he’s digging into how the others got to where they are, then he’s not specifically digging into her.  But she’s not there yet, not convinced of his bona fides despite his reassuring words.  And sitting in his lap with his arms round her, however pleasant, is not conducive to sensible thought or reasoned decisions. 

She deflects, instead.  “Let’s have dinner.”  Maybe if she eats she’ll be able to work this out. 

Castle supposes that eating is better than the alternative of being thrown out and another knock-down drag-out fight when he refuses to go.  They are not done yet.  But she cares. 

“Okay.”

Dinner is quiet.  Castle’s thinking.  Beckett’s thinking.  Conversation is limited to polite requests to pass the salt, or similar.  Neither of them touches the other, even by accident.  Fortunately, the food is good.

Castle is, despite Beckett’s admission, trying to work out why he’s bothered to put so much effort into dealing with Beckett at all.  All they do is fight.  (Or have spectacularly good sex.  Or catch killers.  Or have fun.)  Oh.  Realisation dawns on him.  It’s not she who’s starting every fight.  In fact, it’s pretty well even.  She hadn’t tried to start a fight tonight, though she’d hardly backed away once it got going.  She had, he finally realises, started out trying to be civil.  More, she’d produced an explanation.  Which, okay, wasn’t a total lie.  It wasn’t anywhere close to the whole truth either, though.  She’d still been trying to make him back off, and he still thinks it’s because she was running scared.  But he’d lost his temper first.  Tick in his column.  The time before she sulked (and it was cute) because he wanted answers.  Still, tick in her column.  The time before that – doesn’t count, because he’d done something so appallingly misjudged that even though she’d exploded he really can’t blame her, and they both apologised.  And before that – she’d tried to be reasonable and he’d lost his temper first and then she’d lost hers.  For someone who’s famously smooth, he sure is losing his rag a lot. And then the time before that was the first time she’d lost it with him completely unfairly.  And again, they’d both apologised, which cleaned the slate.

Oh.  He’s lost his temper as much she has.  That’s… worrying.  If he’s the one who’s losing it why would she bother to try to sort it out?  She’s the one who’s kept backing off, she’s the one who needs to be shown that she should stay with him.  And he’s just as much the one who starts the fighting, which is hardly likely to entice her anywhere near him.  But it’s her fault.  If she didn’t keep trying to back off for completely spurious reasons then he wouldn’t be upset.  If she had just told him the truth he wouldn’t have got upset.  He would, though.  Because she’d still be backing away.  He doesn’t want her backing away.  She shouldn’t back away.  But she just admitted she cares, and that she wants it to work.  So maybe it’s worth it.

Beckett is trying to work out why Castle is bothering to stay around and why she should bother even thinking about letting him.  All they do is fight.  (And catch killers.  And have spectacularly good sex.  And have fun.)  There’s too much fighting and too much talking and too many questions she doesn’t want to answer.  Which mostly triggers the fighting.  She’s never reacted like this before.  But if he would just stop asking the damn questions, they wouldn’t fight.  Maybe.  They’d fight less, anyway, because if he didn’t ask the stupid questions he wouldn’t be upset when she didn’t answer them.  But she wants him around.  She wants this to work.

If he’d just stop asking questions she’d be perfectly capable of sticking to her boundaries.  That’s what does it.  He asks questions and it makes her tense, and then the cases get a little too vivid, the memories get a little too sharp, and then he comes along and offers up that large warm frame that she fits into just perfectly and she takes the comfort that frame provides.  So, she rationalises, if he didn’t ask questions they wouldn’t fight so much, nor would she be so tense, so it wouldn’t be about taking care of her.  Wins all round.  Fewer fights, more fun, less stress.  Everything else... would follow naturally.  But he’s just said that he’ll not ask about her past.  So maybe she can do it, and it won’t be another disaster.

She swallows a large mouthful of wine and tries to work out how to say that.  This is why she doesn’t get involved with anyone.  It means talking, and every time she’s ever tried talking it’s come out all wrong and everything has been made worse: not just with Castle but all the times that she’s tried talking before.  She is simply not good at talking.  She _hates_ talking, and complicated relationships, and emotional tangles. Why can’t they just stick to a nice simple uncomplicated arrangement that they both enjoy and both want?  She can even deal with him going out to dinner with some other woman, if he’ll just give her space.  She ignores how much that thought hurts.  She won’t be needy and clinging.  She won’t.  She opens her mouth, already sure that this is going to go badly.

“Castle?”

“Yeah?” he says absently.

“You really mean it?”  Castle takes a moment to work out what she’s referring to, lost in his own thoughts.

“About not taking care of you?  I meant it.  You can do that yourself.”  Beckett nods slowly.

“Okay.”

“And I won’t ask you about your past.  But if you want space” – he manages not to wince at the memories that phrase brings up – “you need to say so.  No more lies.”  Beckett considers that carefully, for some moments, during which Castle wonders if he’s gone too far.  Though that would barely qualify as crossing the start line with most people, let alone actually going too far.

“Okay.  But… _please_ let me do it in my own time.  I can’t deal with being pushed into things.”  There’s the understatement of the century, Castle thinks.  “Let me have space first.  I’ll try to tell you what the problem is, if you’ll give me room to deal with it.”

“Truthfully?  You have to tell me the truth.  I’m not going to listen to lies and evasions.”

“Okay.”  Finally, capitulation.  At last.

“Okay, then.”  The dinner table returns to silence: though now it’s more companionable, there is still a lot of heavy thinking swirling above the plates.

“Beckett?”

“Mmm?”

“What’s your definition of unacceptable taking care of you?”  His idea is rushed out before Castle thinks better of it.  But he needs to know what he can, and can’t, do; and decide if he can live with that.  He also thinks, on present evidence, that Beckett’s definition of _taking care_ might differ substantially from his own.  Maybe they can reach a compromise, like the adults they’re supposed to be, rather than fighting like children.

“What?”

“You don’t want taken care of.  I get that.”  Mostly.  He just doesn’t like it.  “But how do you define being taken care of?  Does it include taking you out to dinner? – though it’s your turn next time.  You said so.  Or getting you a coffee?  Or giving you a hug if you want one?  If I’m upset by something I might want a hug, but it doesn’t mean I expect my mother or Alexis to take care of me.”  He grins suddenly.  “I’d die of shock if Mother did.”  Beckett’s lips quirk a little in return.  “So I don’t define giving you a hug, or… er… _relaxing_ you or even staying over if you want me to as taking care of you.  More like mutually enjoyable pursuits.”  Um.  Mostly.  Sometimes it’s not taking care of her, but mostly he’s thought of it like that.  He’d better start thinking of it in a different way.  Mutual support, perhaps?  “If I tried to stop you taking down a suspect because you might get hurt, or told you to make a dental appointment, or asked you to do your laundry – if I were trying to manage your life – that would be the wrong side of the line.  And stupid.  I don’t wanna do that.”

Beckett clearly appears to be pulled up short by this way of looking at things.  Castle mentally congratulates himself on his inadvertently brilliant idea.  If _she_ defines taking care of her, then she won’t complain later.  Well, she shouldn’t.  And if she does, he can refer her back to her own boundaries.  He likes this idea better and better the more he thinks about it.  He sips his wine and uses the glass to hide his smile.  It’s not that often that he succeeds in out-thinking Beckett, and it must be close to the first time ever that he’s one step ahead in their – whatever-it-is.  Complicated.  That’s what it is.  But she’s said she cares, and that she’ll try to talk.

Beckett is indeed pulled up short.  It hadn’t occurred to her that it would be simplest just to say what she will and won’t put up with – but then again, that would have involved talking about things, which is not precisely her strong point.  However, the more she examines the idea, turning it over and around in her mind, the better the principle looks.  More, she realises, her …er, issues… are mostly focused on not wanting Castle to think she needs taken care of.  She considers his definition of what taking care of her would be – and far more interestingly, what it _isn’t_.  All the things that she’d thought were him trying to take care of her, he thought weren’t.  No wonder they’d fought so.  They were entirely at cross-purposes.  Hmm.  She applies some intense detective logic to what he’s said.  Reduced to its bare essentials: sex and physical contact, or food and coffee – and probably even dresses – is not taking care; trying to interfere with her job and the way she runs her life is.  She ponders that some more, trying to pull it apart for flaws, and not finding any.  Eventually, half a glass of wine later, she looks up.

“Okay.  I can work with that definition if you can too.”  She smiles, properly, for almost the first time since he knocked on her door, raises her wineglass in salute and drains it.   Castle does the same, and smiles back at her.  Dinner’s done, the fighting’s done, and Beckett thinks that now everything is on an even keel. 

“Want some coffee, Castle?  I promise I’m not trying to take care of you either.”  She grins evilly.  “Though of course I have to.”  Castle raises an offended pair of eyebrows.

“How so?  I can take care of myself.”

“I’m a cop.  It’s in the job description.  You don’t get a say.”  She looks entirely too pleased with that idea.  “Which means that if I tell you to stay in the car or out the way you need to do it.”  She picks up the dishes from the table and takes them to the kitchen, drops them in the dishwasher and puts the kettle on.  Castle considers his options and occupies the couch.

“Coffee, please.  Without taking care of me.”  There’s a disgusted noise from the kitchen.  Coffee, and Beckett, arrive in due course in front of and beside him, respectively.  Castle automatically brings an arm along the back of the couch and round Beckett, who equally automatically, and much to his amazement, snuggles into him.

Castle’s happy, because he’s managed to force this on to a truthful basis _and_ Beckett’s said she wants to make this work _and_ he’s convinced Beckett that he’s not trying to take care of her by doing any of the things he likes doing.  Like holding her when she’s upset, or helping her forget, or relaxing her, or cuddling up to her in bed, or on the couch, or in his study – basically, touching her in any way at all.  He can even indulge her in her caffeine addiction.  The disposable coffee cup from the bar down the street lurking in her trashcan had been very informative on her preferred form of coffee.  So he gets to take care of her, except he isn’t taking care of her.  Because they’ve redefined _taking care of her_ to allow all the best bits not to count.  And she’ll tell him the truth.  The upshot of all of that, and all of tonight’s shattering fight and aftermath, is that Beckett’s snuggled up to him now all easy like Sunday morning.

Beckett’s happy, because Castle won’t try to take care of her and won’t look into her past.  So everything’s sorted, nicely within her boundaries.  She doesn’t – didn’t – even have to talk, much, she just had to agree not to lie and try to make this work.  She can do that.  She cradles her coffee mug and simply, uncomplicatedly, enjoys the presence of large, muscled male to lean into.  She’s content that all’s currently right with the world.  All working out for the best, in what is currently the best of all possible worlds.  She tucks her feet up under her, puts her emptied mug down and curls in closer.  It’s really very comfortable: he’s rather firmer than her pillows, but warmer, and just the right size.  It’s very soothing, as she listens to the regular, hypnotic beat of his heart.  Her eyes drop shut, and there doesn’t seem to be any good reason to re-open them.

Castle only realises that Beckett’s drifted off to sleep – or a state of semi-consciousness that’s the next best thing – when he leans forward to dispose of his own empty cup on to the table and she flops forward, necessitating a swift catch so she doesn’t hit the floor.  Or the table.  And since he’s now got both arms round her, it seems unreasonable, nay, unkind, not to settle her on to his lap where they’ll both be more comfortable.  For a given value of comfortable, in his case.  Still, steps one to three of his plan definitely achieved.  _His_ Beckett, in _his_ arms, not backing away, and on _his_ terms.  Totally at ease with him, in fact.  Now if he can stop impulsively reacting and apply his usual calm, cool intelligence and focus ( _like you’ve done so far in this game, Rick?_ ) she’ll stay at ease with it.  He contemplates the current position – physical and emotional – and concludes with considerable satisfaction that this, however Beckett deceives herself, is _definitely_ a relationship.  Tentative and fragile, sure, but a _relationship_.  Though he’s not even going to think that word while Beckett is awake.  She’ll spot it, and run.

After a while, though, the novelty of cuddling a wholly relaxed Beckett – she’s not even twitching – wears off.  Castle levers himself up with Beckett still snug against him and gently conveys her to her bed, admiring her excellent figure as he divests her of the unappealing robe.  Somewhere, he sees, she’s assumed a minimal pair of panties.  He admires them, too.  Though he’d _prefer_ to admire them as they hit the floor.

He’s got no intention of going home..  He re-acquires the book he’d been reading earlier and settles back to it.  When even his night-owl brain is tired, he will slide into bed and cuddle Beckett close and _this_ time when he wakes in the morning she’ll be in his grasp.  Just like a relationship ought to be.  Just like _she_ ought to be, because that’s what he’d wanted, and now that’s what he’s got.

He reads for a while, considers that Beckett won’t mind if he makes himself another coffee, and does, and stays on her couch reading contentedly.  He’d found a book he’d never heard of: an old-fashioned English mystery starring a distinctly odd professor of English (he likes that) as the brilliant amateur solver of crimes to the amazement of all.  He snickers happily at the ridiculous situations Gervase Fen (and who but a British author would come up with a name that silly?) gets himself and his friends into, and reads, in the end, for far longer than he’d meant to, being more than the half hour he’d planned on to let Beckett fall deeply into sleep.  Eventually he silently washes up and slips into bed beside Beckett around midnight: earlier than usual for him, but then, there’s a good reason.  He wriggles closer and wraps her against him and notes, again, how perfectly she fits against him.  Just the way things ought to be.

He’s Rick Castle, and he _always_ gets what he wants.  He’s Rick Castle, and all his dreams are coming true.


	48. Wanna see my smiling face

This time when he wakes, briefly in the night and then again in the morning, blissfully undisturbed by  any alarm clock, Beckett is still there, instead of on her couch, or awake and working, or any of the many places she might be in preference to being in his arms.  It feels good.  Better than good, it’s _right_ , watching a sleepy-eyed Beckett stretch out, find he’s still there and smile and turn to him, which gets exactly the response she clearly expects: slow and easy and gentle.

Some long time later, in this new spirit of communication, Castle thinks that he’d better make sure that Beckett knows that he has to take some very boring (because it’s not Beckett) woman out to dinner on Wednesday in payment of his mother’s auctioneering.  Especially as, he finally remembers, he’d flung it out at her as part of their fight, and then forgotten.  He stares into his coffee in the vague hope that it will provide him with a script.  Naturally, it doesn’t.

“What’s the problem, Castle?  You haven’t spoken for at least five minutes.  Are you sick?”  Beckett’s teasing tones cut through his reverie.

“No.  I can be quiet.”   There’s a noise of disagreement.  “I was thinking.”  An eyebrow quirks up at him.  “You know I said I was going out to dinner on Wednesday?” 

Beckett doesn’t need to think back.  That had been part of the row.  “Yeah.”

“It’s the woman that bid on me at the fundraiser.”  Ah.  That is considerably more of a relief than she expected.  Beckett thinks for a moment, and eventually comes up with a rather blurred impression of a 60-something year old in a very expensive dress that would have suited her excellently 35 years earlier, and enough jewellery to stock De Beers.  Doesn’t seem to be anything to worry about there. 

“Yeah?” 

“Well…”

“Well?”

“She bid on me for her daughter.  Who’s 26, and just about to start a general surgery residency at Presbyterian.” 

“Oh?”  Beckett is not at all impressed by this slant on events, but Castle had been bid on, and he does have to fulfil his obligations.  She crams down an unworthy worm of – jealousy?  No – irritation.  Really.  It’s not a problem, if that’s why he’s going.  Really.  In fact, she thinks, it might be helpful.  If Castle’s on page six – and he undoubtedly will be, because she can’t imagine that this won’t go into his PR schedule – with some freshly-minted doctor, then nobody would ever think that he’s with her.  Hmmm.  This could be seriously advantageous.  Really.

“Okay then.  Guess we won’t be seeing you at the precinct that day.  You’ll be too busy polishing your tux.”  She grins, as if completely carefree.  “We’ll put the page six photos up on the murder board, if you like.  Where are you going, so we can tip off the paparazzi?  Or Espo can come and sell you roses and play the violin.”  Now she’s laughing.

Castle is nonplussed.  He’d expected – God knows why, since Beckett never reacts the way he expects – her to be just a little irritated, or something.  This casual acceptance that he’ll take some other, younger woman out to dinner, and be splashed all over the tabloids in doing so, doesn’t make him happy.  It should do.  It’s not like he wants the jealous rages Meredith had gone in for if he’d been within ten feet of another woman (he’d never cheated on her) and which she’d done her best to provoke in him; nor does he want the chilly, superior boys-will-be-boys attitude that Gina had displayed.  But a small indication that Beckett didn’t like it, so that he could provide reassurance and demonstrate that it’s she who matters, would have been nice.

“Don’t you care?”

“Nah,” says Beckett lightly.  “Why should I?”  She does.  Just a little.   Well, quite a lot, if it’s not the 60-something.  Actually, massively.  This woman sounds intelligent, and is probably free of … issues.  Quite a change from a hard-ass cop with relationship anxiety and an obsession with murder.  But she shouldn’t be jealous: it’s mistrustful, so she’ll pretend she isn’t.  Objecting seems a little… well, a lot… needy.  Unattractively so. 

“Okay.”  It sounds perfectly cheerful.  But a snake of insecurity about how much Beckett really cares wriggles into Castle’s brain, and nests comfortably there.  It’s still squiggling through the nooks and crannies of his thinking long after he’s gone home.

* * *

 

Beckett spends her Tuesday in peaceful contemplation of her favourite museums and another long, muscle stretching run.  When she returns to the precinct on Wednesday life seems pretty good, even if all there is to do is paperwork and cold cases.

“Whaddya do on your vacation, Beckett?”

“Vacation?  Two days.  Hardly a vacation.  Tidied up, went to MOMA.” 

Esposito makes a face.  MOMA is not his thing.  Art galleries of any sort are not his thing.  Baseball games, now… or pick-up basketball, or his gym.  Ryan, on the other hand, is looking vaguely enthusiastic.  He even manages a short discussion with Beckett about one of the exhibits.  Esposito wonders how he got landed with a partner who knows about art.  He’s just glad that Ryan’s a proper cop, under that, and the hopelessly uncool dress sense.  He has to excuse Beckett.  She’s different.  And definitely a proper cop.

Wednesday wanders slowly by.  At the end of the day, Beckett’s remembered that Castle’s going out on his auctioned-off date tonight.  It’s still not making her happy.  The photos on page six on Thursday morning don’t make her happy either.

* * *

 

Wednesday evening Castle puts on his best suave look, ensures his designer stubble, carefully allowed to appear over the last two days (since he’d last seen Beckett: she’d said she wanted space, so she can have some.), is perfectly in order, and dresses to project the PR image of Casanova Castle.  He looks perfectly like he used to at a hundred celebrity parties.

He hates it. 

He looks in the mirror and sees the man he doesn’t want to be any more: the spoilt, shallow, self-indulgent playboy who simply wanted Beckett in bed, once, to get her out of his system and write shallow, slick thrillers starring a sexed-up cop that would sell by the squillion; the man who’d manipulated his way through the last two months until coruscating honesty brought him up short; showed him what he was becoming; showed him he could be better than that; the man who’s changed so much, in such a short time, because of one spoilt, shallow, self-indulgent decision: to push his way into following the one woman who turned him down flat.  He looks coldly at the man in the mirror, losing the superficial, flirtatious smile.  He is not that man any more.  He has become, is becoming, more.

He has to do this, because he doesn’t break his promises; he doesn’t let his mother down; and pulling out would be shallow, spoilt and selfish.  He could refund the charity – he wouldn’t even notice the cost of it – but that would be cheating the woman who’d bought his company for her daughter for an evening.  Feeling like a gigolo is a small price to pay – he can pay it from the endless account of his pride – to keep his mother happy and to preserve his self-respect.  He keeps his promises: it’s a matter of pride, or honour.

It had certainly made Paula happy.  She’s promised mayhem if he doesn’t put up a playboy performance.  However, she’s been left in no doubt that this is all show; and that this is not happening again.  He’ll do the book parties, the occasional celebrity circuit, but he’s told her to cut it right back.  She squawked and squealed, until he laid down the law.  _He_ pays _her_.  Not vice versa.  So sort it, Paula.  No more cosy dinners-for-two in flashy, paparazzi infested restaurants.  Public parties, with no carefully staged - _interactions_.  No more signing chests: books only.  He picks up his jacket and leaves.

The newly-minted doctor is pretty, and wise.  Sadly, she’s anything but witty.  Castle is normally interested in nearly anything that passes his nose, all of it being grist to his writer’s mill, but this woman is too earnest to be interesting.  Lanie’s interesting, but this woman isn’t.  Every time he asks a question he gets a detailed anatomical description, or a procedural disquisition.  What he doesn’t get is any feeling of enthusiasm, or love for her chosen profession.  He’s somewhat surprised by that.  Usually, he’d thought, medical types are vocational.  As dinner drags on, it becomes increasingly apparent that the doctor has no interest in his books, no interest in him, and doesn’t really want to be here.  It finally, and completely accidentally, dawns on Castle that the reason she’s so earnest is because her true love is research, and he’s been asking all the wrong prompt questions.  When he asks the right questions, she blossoms.  She _also_ spills out that her mother had set this up because she never meets any _nice boys_ so her mother thought that she’d be just his type (What? thinks Castle.  Female and pretty?  Is that who he was?  He’s so over that.) and even if she wasn’t the dinner would be good. 

Dinner improves, but this woman still isn’t interesting.  She’s too short.  Her hair’s the wrong colour.  She doesn’t snark at him.  She’s too polite, and too pleasant, and too nice.  She’s sweet, and he’s decided that he likes sour.  She doesn’t solve murders.  In short, she’s not Beckett.  But still he acts the way his public expects, the way that Paula expects, and takes a certain amount of bleak satisfaction from having been able to draw out this doctor.  He’s very conscious that he was papped when he came in and he’ll be papped when they leave.  Time to act for the cameras.  He doesn’t want to, but he has to.  It’s part of his persona.  Was.  Was part of the persona.  Not any more, after tonight.

He escorts her flirtatiously out and makes sure that he pecks her on the cheek, perfectly placed and planned for the paparazzi, before swishing her into a limo.  That’ll be the page six photo tomorrow; Paula will be off his back; and he can get on with the more important aspects of his life. Such as going to the precinct, questioning Beckett about the Academy and her route to Homicide – very carefully, so as not to trip her alarms – and later, meeting her for a different purpose.

* * *

 

It seems that every detective and uniform in the bullpen has wandered casually by Beckett’s desk this morning to see how she’s reacting to her shadow’s page six photos and the article beneath them.  Most of them have done an embarrassed double-take as they see the photos on the murder board, and rapidly exited without uttering any of the comments they were clearly thinking.  Putting the photos on full display and making it clear she thinks it’s a huge joke has worked.  After the first few pass by, it becomes a game.

“Hey, Espo?”

“Yo, Beckett?”

“You think the next one will say anything?  I’ll bet you five no-one else does.”

“That’s because every one that comes by you glare at like you’d like to shoot them.  They don’t dare flap their jaws, with that look.”  Ryan sniggers.

“Bet?”

“No bet.”  Beckett looks disappointed that she won’t be taking his money.  “No bet.  Why you glaring so, anyway?  It’s not like you’re dating him, is it?”  Beckett doesn’t flinch.  Not least because Ryan and Esposito are very unsubtly watching her as if she were a suspect in Interrogation.  She becomes a little suspicious that there’s more to their curiosity than the normal joshing.

“Nah.  It’s just… unseemly.”

“You what?”

“Unseemly,” Ryan says.  “Like, not polite.”  Esposito looks distinctly cynical.

“We’re talkin’ bout Castle here, bro.  When’s he ever been shy ‘n’ retiring?  Pretty girl, though.  No wonder he kissed her.”  Beckett’s hand, safely under the desk, clenches till her knuckles turn white.  The angle of the photo makes it look a good deal more intimate than it had been, but she can’t tell that.  The day passes in a haze of very firmly suppressed irritation and even more suppressed jealousy, as a result of which, by the time Castle meanders into the bullpen late in the afternoon, Beckett is suffering from a severe tension headache and can’t wait to go home.  Answering questions about the Academy years ago is not really on her to-do list for today.  Two more Tylenol and going home to have a shower and sleep is.  She’d only had another hour to go.

“Hey, Beckett.”  Castle looks up at the murder board.  “What the hell?”

“What’s wrong, didn’t they get your best side?” Ryan snarks. 

Castle just manages not to say _I know you said you would put them up but I didn’t think you meant it._   Then he takes a second look.   _Shit_.  The pride of page six photo looks as if he was considerably more into the pretty, boring doctor than he had been.  Not that that would have been hard.  On balance, he’d have been more into a goldfish.  It hadn’t even been her fault.  She just hadn’t been Beckett.  Who, now he takes a look, seems a little stressed, by the tiny creases round her eyes and the pinch in her lips.  He decides that discretion is the better part of bullpen valour and goes to make her – and him – a coffee.  It’s greeted with a wan smile which appears to take some effort.  Castle goes to exchange compliments with Ryan and Esposito, rather than annoy Beckett.

“Yo, Castle.”

“Hey, guys.”

“Who’s the girl?”

Castle grins, and decides to share the sorry tale. The boys will appreciate it, and won’t blab outside the precinct. 

“You know my mother auctioned me off at the fundraiser?”

“Yeah.  Beef on the hoof.  Nearly as heavy, too.”  Castle looks very straight at Esposito just for an instant.  Ryan doesn’t quite get the sudden flick of Esposito’s eyes, but Castle interprets it perfectly as a concession that Espo’s overstepped.

“Well, I had to go through with it and I thought the buyer was a senior.  Turns out she wanted to buy me for her daughter.”  The boys laugh.

“What are you, Castle, a birthday present?  Where’s the bow round your neck?”

“Ooohhh,” sniggers Ryan, “was she supposed to unwrap you?”  Castle’s smile grows a little strained.

“She was a doctor.  Just out of med school.  Pretty, intelligent, nice manners – and boring as hell.  All she wanted to do was research.  Not even people.  I thought a doctor would be more like Lanie” –

“You haven’t met Perlmutter yet, have you?” –

“you know, all snappy and interesting.  I’ve never been so bored.”

“Must be a hard life, Castle, meetin’ all these pretty women and bein’ bored.”  Castle loftily ignores that.

“I mean, what is serum electrophoresis anyway?  I’m sure it’s really important but I didn’t even understand the words.”

“Separation of charged molecules through a gel.”  Beckett sounds wholly smug.  The three men look at her, agape.  Esposito gets there first.

“How the frig do you know that?  That’s just weird.”

“Too much Trivial Pursuit, Beckett?”  Ryan chips in.  Castle’s simply standing open-mouthed.

“Natural brilliance.”  She looks at them all.  “Catching flies, Castle?”

“Why’d you put the photos up?”

“We’re starting an art gallery.  If we’d charged admission we’d be rich already.”  Castle smiles very smugly.

“I’m just so popular.  Must be my handsome face.”  Esposito snorts very audibly.

“More like notoriety than popularity.  Have you seen the article?”  Castle shakes his head, and wanders over to the cutting to read it.

The caption to the photo is bad enough.  _Blocked writer Rick Castle seeking new inspiration?_   The article under it is worse.  _Celebrity playboy and notorious womaniser Rick Castle can’t seem to cure his writer’s block.  He killed off his golden-goose character Derrick Storm and so far there’s no indication he’s found anything new, despite reputedly spending a lot of time “shadowing” the cops – or is it one particular cop? - of the Twelfth Precinct.  Looks like he’s already bored with that.  Speculation on whether he’ll ever write anything again continues to rise.  But he certainly seems to be enjoying his hunt for inspiration._

Ten seconds after he starts reading there’s a strangled explosion and he’s cursing vilely.  Ten seconds after _that_ he’s on the phone in the conference room with the door shut.  It doesn’t block much of the discussion with Paula.  She can probably hear him without needing the phone.

Ryan looks interested.  “Guess he didn’t like the article.” Castle re-emerges not looking any better pleased with the day and crashes down into his chair, still muttering imprecations and profanities.  There’s very little sign of the normal, amiable precinct visitor right now.

“Problem?” Beckett asks, not particularly sympathetically.  “It looks like you had a good time, from the photo.”

“Weren’t you listening?” Castle spits out.  “It was the most boring evening I’ve ever had.  The photo’s completely misleading.”  But it’s interesting that there had been a not-so faint edge in Beckett’s voice.  Maybe she hadn’t been nearly as indifferent as she had seemed.  Hmm.   He feels a little bit better.

Beckett puts on a falsely sympathetic look and pats his hand patronisingly.  “Poor thing.  It’s so hard, having to listen to something you aren’t interested in.”  She smiles evilly, headache reducing and mood improving on finding that Castle hadn’t enjoyed himself.  “Bit like listening to entirely ridiculous conversations, really.”  That doesn’t improve Castle’s expression, or mood, any further.

Beckett returns to the paperwork, moderately comforted but still with her headache.  Castle continues to fulminate, not overly quietly.  Beckett puts up with it for precisely three minutes – which is two and a half minutes more than she would normally allow – and then gets sufficiently exasperated, exacerbated by her renewed headache from the toxic smog of Castle’s anger, to object.

“Castle, please either _shut up_ or go home.  I can’t concentrate with you muttering.”

“Sorry,” Castle mutters.  Beckett growls at him for the further mutter, not nicely.  He’s still infuriated by the snide article, and Paula hadn’t been any help at all.  He’d made it perfectly clear to her that references to the cops he’s shadowing are unacceptable, and all she’d done was point out that she didn’t have a veto on what’s published on page six.  He keeps quiet, and finds that the precinct, who don’t really care about page six except to rag him like they do their own, is actually soothing.  Still, he thinks that the best consolation might be an evening spent partly with the team in a bar, which is optional, and later with Beckett, in private, which is not so optional.

His hopes are firmly dashed at the end of shift when they leave.  Beckett declines a drink (fortunately he’d asked her first of the team, so he doesn’t bother asking anyone else.  He’s not in the mood for more of the boys’ humour, tonight.) and anything else.  But – amazingly – she produces a brief – very brief, but truthful – explanation as to why she needs space.  She’s really trying to play nice.  And she’d been at least a little bit jealous.  So at a safe distance from the precinct and any gossip, and after a check that there are no paparazzi around, Castle bids her farewell with a gentle hug and all-too-restrained kiss, and leaves, if not happy, at least content that they are moving in very much the right direction.    _His_ direction.


	49. We don't need another hero

Beckett’s phone rings early Sunday.  That’s not fair.  She’s supposed to have this Sunday off.  But when it’s Montgomery instructing her to get her ass downtown, refusing to give her any information till she gets to the scene, she hustles.  It’s as well Castle hadn’t been with her.  It might have been difficult to keep things quiet if they’d shown up together.  There’s been quite a bit of together, by her standards.  But no _taking care_.  She doesn’t notice the warmth curling in her stomach when she sees Castle waiting at the scene, holding two coffees and a paper bag which proves to contain a bear claw. 

“Morning.  Grande skim latte, two pumps sugar free vanilla, and a bear claw.”  Beckett raises her brows.  She doesn’t remember telling him that this is her preferred coffee order, and breakfast.

“How did you know?”  There’s an element of raised hackles bumping under her question.  He’s clearly been observing rather more closely than she’d realised.  If he’s paying that much attention, what _else_ is he noticing?  Apart from her preferences, that is.  For so many things.

“I’m a writer. It’s my job to notice things.”  He smiles in a way that makes it clear that some of the things he’s noticed have nothing to do with the novel.  At least, they’d better not if he wants to live past publication.  Thinking of which… The next few moments are consumed in a lively discussion of the impropriety of the book cover which has been proposed.  As with the name, changes are not offered.  Bullets are offered, should there be no change to the picture, and declined.

Given Montgomery’s calls, Beckett drains her coffee twice as fast as normal and they go on in.  It’s... off.  For a start, there’s no obvious body.  Secondly, Montgomery’s there in person.  

“Sir?  What’s going on?”

“Two-year old girl, Angela Candela, reported missing by her parents about eight o’clock this morning.”  Oh hell.  She hates child cases.  They hit so much harder, and the last one – didn’t go so good.  This will be bad.  She needs to get started: the parents will need every ounce of compassion she can supply.

“Where’d they find the body?”  She’d expect to see it already, if this is the scene – and why are they all here, if it isn’t?

“They haven’t found her.  She was abducted.  Father was in the other room, painting.”  From the bite on the final word, Montgomery does not sound wholly impressed by this.

“Kidnapped her from her home?”  Castle sounds like he’s been punched.  Of course, his daughter must have been two once.  Beckett can feel him tensing up behind her, far from his usual smooth self.

“I don’t understand, Sir.  If this isn’t a murder, why am I here?”  She doesn’t do non-Homicide work, any more.  There’s no reason for her to be here.

“The Feds requested you to be on the task force.”  What?  That’s very unusual, and how would they... oh.  Oh _shit_.  No.  Please, no. 

“Feds?”  Surely Castle knows why it’s the Feebies?  He must have covered this in his previous research.  She answers, anyway, because it stops the cold chill running down her spine. 

“FBI has jurisdiction over child abduction cases.”

“Then why call me?” Castle’s asking.  Castle’s even less likely to be wanted on a Federal case than he was on the Tisdale case.  The Feds don’t always play nice with other law enforcement agencies, let alone with civilian consultants.  What’s Montgomery playing at?  If Beckett’s appalled suspicion is correct, Montgomery’s been forced to allow the Feds – one Fed, in particular - to set up a powder keg and in revenge, tossed Castle in to be the match.

“Cause I like pissing off the FBI.  And because you think outside the box.  That’s something the Feebs rarely do.”  Oh Captain, my Captain.  What the _hell_ is Montgomery playing at?

“Sir, who’s the Special Agent in charge?”  That’s when Castle notices it all starting to go very badly wrong.  Montgomery starts to weasel, which is rather unusual.  He’s embarrassed, too.  Beckett gets ...forceful.  Eventually Montgomery admits the name.

“Sorenson.”  Beckett instantly pulls down all known shutters, and retreats into the nuclear shelter of her reserve.  Castle scents a story, and not one with a happy ending.  In fact, since his brain has woken up despite how ridiculously early it is on a Sunday, he thinks that this might just be the idiot who messed up Beckett and left her with a pathological antipathy to comfort, care and relationships.  He’d like a ...discussion... with him, at a suitable juncture.  Which is not, however much Castle wants it, now.  Kidnapped children beat everything.  Still, he can’t resist asking the obvious question.

“Who’s Sorenson?”

Sorenson turns out to be a lantern-jawed poster-boy for the Feds.  Castle supposes that an impressionable woman might call him handsome, though personally he doesn’t see it.  He notes with more irritation that Sorenson is about his height.  A rogue picture of Beckett tucked into this action hero’s arm scuttles through his wayward mind.  He resolutely blocks any other pictures.  About that point, he sees how Sorenson is looking at Beckett.  He recognises that look.  He sees it in his own shaving mirror whenever he’s thinking about her.  Possessiveness and hunger and heat all mixed up.  There’s something missing from Sorenson’s expression, however, though he can’t quite put a finger on what it might be.  Still.  Sorenson has no business looking at Beckett like that.  Sorenson doesn’t have her.  He does.  And he’s keeping her.  No slick Fed is going to interfere.  No matter how much said slick Fed looks as if he wants to.  Though that’s interesting, too.  He’d concluded that whoever it was had left Beckett.  If that had been the case, it looks very like he’s decided that that had been a mistake.

While all these thoughts are anthill-busy in Castle’s mind, building on the instant antagonism he’d felt when he saw how Sorenson looked at Beckett, he also notes that Beckett has noticed Sorenson, and that Sorenson is on his way over, displaying much the same focus as a falcon on a mouse.  Castle stops thinking and starts observing.  Beckett is as closed-off as he’s ever seen her, and the chill radiating from her would keep freezers cold all over the entire USA for months.  Castle guesses she’s not happy about this situation. 

“Agent Sorenson,” Beckett says, with frozen formality and a tone Castle instantly recognises as glacial fury underneath.  He’s extremely interested in that tone.  Beckett notices his closeness and quite deliberately walks away, out of earshot.  Castle’s left considering what he knows about that tone from Beckett and discovering with every memory that where he’s concerned it’s meant not just anger but a follow-up of arousal.  A fog of jealousy starts to form below his conscious mind.

“Kate.”

“You call me Detective Beckett, Agent.  Nothing else.  This is an investigation.”

“You weren’t so formal” –

“That was then.  I think formality is perfectly appropriate in the circumstances.”

“You’re still sore I went to Boston.  You could have come too.”

“Why should I have given up my career and my life? Except – oh, I forgot.  The big, tough Agent told me to.  Because he would look after me.”  From a safe distance, and even unable to hear anything, Castle recognises the posture as conveying vitriolic dislike.  His jealousy starts to recede.  She’d never produced that posture to him, even at their worst moments.  “No thank you.  I like my own life.”  She pauses, regroups.  “Now.  This case.  That’s what I’m apparently here for.”  She raises her voice a fraction.  “With my partner.”

“Partner?  I don’t see another cop here.  So who’s the civilian following you around?”

“Castle?  Richard Castle.  Author.  If you ever read any books, you might know that.  And my partner.”  She is not letting Sorenson have his own way.  Castle might not be a cop, might not formally be her partner, but she is certainly not allowing him to be written off as not her partner.  She and her team can do that, but only to wind him up.  Sorenson – doesn’t get to.  Doesn’t have the right.

“Oh, the one you’re such a fan of?  Does he know that?  How’d you swing that, Kate” -

“ _Detective Beckett_ , if you want me anywhere near this case to help you save your Federal ass.  Why am I here?  I’m a Homicide detective.  Can’t you do it yourself, Agent?  Just like you couldn’t do it yourself when you tried last time and that’s why it all went south?” Sorenson makes a slight forward move.  Beckett is wholly unintimidated.

“Doesn’t look like you can either if you have to have a civilian so-called partner around.”  Beckett looks Sorenson straight in the eye. 

“I can do it with my team.  Teamwork, Agent.  Do you know what that is yet – a team?  He’s a part of my team and he’s a better detective than you ever were.”  She just stops herself saying _and a damn sight better in bed, too._   Fortunately at that moment a tech appears and Sorenson is distracted.  Beckett takes the opportunity to escape and start working out what her team need to do.  When Sorenson returns he produces a photo and fills in the details of what happened. 

Castle is wholly unimpressed with the father’s behaviour.  He’d never have done that – never had done that – with Alexis, no matter how much he’d wanted to have some time off, no matter how much he’d wanted to write.  If she’d wanted him, he’d been right there.  Sure, sometimes there had been a babysitter, and sometimes, with a deadline approaching, a short-term nanny, but he had never abdicated like this man, never simply turned on the TV and shut himself away.  Especially not if he couldn’t have heard his child.  Earbuds and i-Pod?  What sort of a parent is this jerk, anyway?  However, in view of the raging tension around Beckett and the expression of ill-controlled fury on Sorenson’s face it might be an idea to stay quiet.  But when this is over for the day he is going to take Beckett for a drink – ask Beckett, _ask_ Beckett, he can’t _tell_ her to do anything – and reduce that tension to a bearable level.  He doesn’t need to ask anything to be sure, now, that this is the asshole who messed her up.

His view of the father does not improve as it becomes clear that he’d never got around to basic safety precautions – despite the fact that he’d been home all day every day, and that the lack of these had allowed the kidnap.  Still, however poor a father this man had been, if they don’t solve this in a hell of a hurry – successfully, before any of the worst outcomes Castle can imagine occur (there are plenty of those) then he’ll never forgive himself.  Nor will his wife.   Forgive herself, or him.

Another tech bearing tapping equipment sidles up to Sorenson, and is brusquely instructed to get the tap on the phone.  Beckett’s looking rather more tense than even what had clearly been a fight would suggest.  Sorenson gets a little closer to her than Castle would like, and produces a _there-there-now_ tone which Castle cannot imagine is going to improve her mood.  Sorenson’s closeness is not improving Castle’s mood, either.  Sorenson had had his chance, and lost it.

“This one’ll end better.  I promise.”  Castle is instantly intrigued.  And infuriated.  It’s _his_ job to reassure Beckett, though he doesn’t think platitudes like that will help at all.  And what was the previous one?  But he doesn’t ask.  The rules are very clear.  Don’t ask about her past.

And he doesn’t.  All the way back to the precinct. Beckett is profoundly grateful.  That case had been an absolute disaster.  Sure they got the guy, but Sorenson had been trying to make his name – and after they had broken up, which had been the night they closed the case, she’d realised that he’d also been trying to prove he was better than she at the job, trying to prove that he was a better man than any on her team.  So he’d tried to do it on his own, and as a result – though it might well have gone south anyway – he’d caught the bad guy too late to save the child.  She’d taken a different lesson from that.  First – career is secondary to saving people.  Second – never work with assholes more interested in their own ego than the team.

“Six months.” Beckett says, in the elevator, out of nowhere.  Well.  Probably out of the suffocating effort of Castle not saying anything at all.  Though he’s a lot closer than he usually is at this time of day, and Beckett has the distinct feeling that, if it weren’t daytime in the precinct with plenty people wanting to ride the elevator, he’d be in close physical contact, not just standing very near.  She runs a very quick finger across his arm, small, invisible, reassurance, though whether that’s for him or her would be impossible for her to say.  The tension only diminishes very marginally.

“Six months’ what?” asks Castle, who hadn’t been expecting any comment at all on general Beckett principles, and is rather caught napping by her words and gesture.  He’d have touched her first, if he hadn’t calculated that she’s in the mood to shoot first and not bother asking questions later.

“We dated for six months.”  Or something.  She’d thought it had been more than just dating.  Then he’d told her they were moving to Boston, straight after the disastrous case result.  His view of _more_ hadn’t precisely coincided with hers.  She hadn’t contacted Sorenson from that day to this; hadn’t thought of him; mourned her own mistake and stupidity for a week and then she’d moved on, without a scar.  She doesn’t see that he’d left no scars because the wound to her emotions, the same one that stops her letting anyone in to take care of her, hasn’t healed.

“I didn’t ask,” Castle points out.  Beckett had noticed that.  She’d also noticed just how much he wanted to know, and how much he hadn’t asked.  He’s keeping to her rule.  She peeks at him when she thinks he isn’t looking, comparing him to Sorenson.  She hadn’t missed the instant antagonism between them.  Another problem that Sorenson’s causing her.

“Yeah, I know.”  She sounds resigned.  “You were not asking very loudly.”

They get half way to the bullpen before she says anything more.

“Kidnapping.  A six-year old boy.” 

She must be rocked by this one – again.  She’d been rocked by the last case, too.  Too many cases, too much, hitting her too hard, too often, he thinks.  There’s a note of unhappiness in her voice that he hasn’t heard before.  He thinks that he’ll be offering her forgetfulness, later.  Maybe it’ll clear his own thoughts.  She’s been fighting with Sorenson, just like – it looked just like – she fights with him.  And he knows where fighting with him led.  Leads.  Though she’s talking, and she touched him.  But it worries him, deep down, because what if she has the same reactions to Sorenson now as, presumably, she had back then?  He _won’t_ share.  The minor little fact that he’s projecting his own insecurity and history on to her doesn’t register.  The much bigger point that Beckett’s granite integrity would never permit her to cheat on him doesn’t diminish his worry.  He _knows_ that she would never cheat, intellectually.  Unfortunately, his intellect isn’t having much luck convincing his gut.  He has got to get a grip on himself, stat.  He dares a question, since she’s opened the subject and hasn’t closed it down.

“How’d it end?”

“We got the guy.”  But that doesn’t sound to Castle like it was a wholesale success, case closed, everybody lives happily ever after; and the twist to Beckett’s mouth doesn’t indicate it either.

Esposito and Ryan are already on the case, which is just as well.  Beckett isn’t in any mood to cut anyone any slack.  Time to run down everyone who could possibly have had access, everyone around, right down to the street-sweepers and the garbage collectors.  Never know where there might be a creepy-crawler lurking.  They can’t afford – Beckett can’t afford – to overlook anything that might be a lead. But then her phone rings and there’s been a ransom demand and they can stop the random search and focus on the particular.

They don’t discuss much on the way.  Beckett’s barriered to the nth degree, and for once Castle isn’t annoyed by it.  He can see far too clearly how that old case went down, and all the time he’s thinking how he would feel if it had been Alexis: then or now.  It isn’t doing much to manage down his protective instincts, and if it weren’t that Alexis were in school he’d be running home to make sure that she was safe.  It’s not helping him not wrap Beckett up into him, either, comfort her against remembered pain and failure.  (He knows how failure feels.  He’s spent a long time being a success, to forget how failure feels.)

The recording of the call doesn’t help.  The voice has been scrambled and the transmission’s through voice-over-internet so it’s untraceable too.  Someone’s set this up really well.  And the demand is enough to clean out the Candelas – it’s all their liquid and illiquid assets.  Everything.  Sorenson produces a rousing oration of no value or help for the parents and then disappears to the kitchen.  Beckett is talking quietly with various people.  After a few instants, Castle follows Sorenson.  He wants a much better feel for this man.  He crams down all the epithets he’d like to apply to him and puts a lock on his temper.  Getting into an argument while the desperate parents are in the next room is crass.  But he very much wants to understand Sorenson.  And lay a marker down, subtly.  If Sorenson thinks he can try to pick up where he left off (fool) he needs to understand that’s not part of Castle’s playbook.  He only hopes it’s not part of Beckett’s.

“You do this a lot?  Kidnappings?  You seem to know what to say.”  It’s in his best mildly interested, slightly superior tone, conveying a slight dislike behind the apparently perfectly pleasant tone.  Castle’s not taking much care to hide who he really is, either.

“It’s not about what you say.  It’s about controlling the situation.  Controlling your emotions.”  Which is actually quite interesting, especially given that Sorenson and Beckett have already had one fight this morning.  Not much control of the emotions there.  Let’s push on that open sore and see what happens.

“You requested your ex-girlfriend for the task force.”  There’s a very ugly flash across Sorenson’s face, right when Castle puts a little extra emphasis on the _ex_.  Ah.  _Trying to get her back, Sorenson?  Not if I can help it._   And isn’t it a little unprofessional to try to use a crime to solve your romantic mistakes?  “That doesn’t indicate, to me, a control over your emotions.”  Outside the case, anyway.

“I requested Beckett because she’s the best in the city.”  _Getting angry, are you, Sorenson?  And defensive._   She is the best in the city, though Castle didn’t need a Fed to tell him that.

“ _Not_ because you wanted to see her again?”  Castle makes his disbelief plain, adding a spice of contempt to it.

“How about you, Castle?  You’ve written what, twenty bestsellers?”  _And now you’re trying to rile me.  Not going to happen.  Better men than you have failed at that._

“Twenty-six, actually, but who’s counting?”

“Why the sudden need to shadow a real detective?”  Castle grins widely.

“Well, the ones on TV seemed oddly fixated on their sunglasses.” 

“So with all the fat, balding detectives in the NYPD, you just happen to end up shadowing her.”  _No, I made it happen.  Just the way I wanted it to.  I get what I want.  And then I keep it._

“Must be fate,” Castle says, with a predatory grin that implies much, much more than he’s just shadowing Beckett.  _Mine, Sorenson.  All mine_. Another ugly flash skids through Sorenson’s face.

“Must be,” repeats Sorenson, bitterly.  Castle simply smiles, suavely.


	50. The girl is mine

When Beckett walks into the kitchen she looks between them and recognises instantly the testosterone charge in the atmosphere.  She’s not impressed.  The last thing the case needs is Castle and Sorenson locking antlers like moose in rut.  She ignores it completely.  If they think she’s some sort of prize to be fought over they are both completely wrong.  She’ll decide what, and who, she wants.  She turns to the meat of the case, being the imminent arrival of a CPA qualified sister and the discussion of how to pay the ransom.  It doesn’t noticeably lower the antagonism level, or the testosterone.

During discussions with the CPA it becomes clear that Sorenson isn’t exactly willing to let Castle have a turn on the swings.  Beckett recognises the technique: subtle – and not so subtle - cutting off, the slightly turned shoulder blocking Castle from the circle, the lack of any eye contact.  She’s even less impressed.  Castle may have been a pain in the ass (still is, sometimes) but he’s helped her and her team to be a better unit to solve crime – and, she realises, he may not be a cop but what she’d said to Sorenson as a _shut-up-and-live-with-it_ comment that Castle was her partner is actually entirely true.  Truth in anger.  Well now.  When did she start thinking like that?  She’d told him he couldn’t be her partner, because he wasn’t a cop.  But... he’s had her back, he helps her solve crimes, he’s ...well, he’s a part of the team.  Okay.  Maybe he isn’t an official partner, but that doesn’t matter.  Another small curl of warmth joins the one that Castle providing breakfast caused.

Still, she’s going to need to deal with this piece of macho posturing fairly swiftly.  She’s not prepared to watch another kidnapping go south because Sorenson can’t play nice with others.  She’s certainly not going to allow him to think that he can cut Castle out.  On the case or otherwise.  Sorenson had done that before to a team member (with considerably less justification, given that she’d been dating Sorenson at the time) and it had contributed significantly to the dreadful outcome.  It is not going to happen again.  This time, they’re – she is - going to make it come out right.  Whatever it takes, and whoever’s feelings get trampled on the way.

Suddenly, they have a lead.  They haul in a man who’d threatened Mrs Candela, shove him into Interrogation.  Much to Beckett’s annoyance, Sorenson assumes he’ll lead and then bars Castle.  Neither makes her happy.  She’s got used, over these last weeks, to Castle’s left-field questions and their joint style.  And she leads, always, in Interrogation.  She’s the best at it: the combination of empathy and aggression, the intense atmosphere that surrounds her and her suspect and forces admissions they never meant to make, elicits truth.  More truth than anyone can handle, sometimes. 

Castle watches the aura of spiky, angry irritation rise around Beckett and is uncomfortably reminded of the way in which she used to react to him.  The jealousy he won’t let himself know he’s feeling thickens darkly.  He forces himself to concentrate on the interrogation, because anything he can provide that will help her solve the case keeps her close, feeds her addiction to successful closure, and to his presence.  He’ll feed her addiction to him later.

It wasn’t this guy, though.  That’s clear.  His reactions are all wrong.  And when everyone gets out of Interrogation and Observation and they’re all discussing it, Castle points that out.  Predictably (at least predicted by Castle, who’s perfectly well aware of what Sorenson is trying to do) Sorenson pooh-poohs it.  It’s all beginning to square up to a fight in the bullpen when Beckett steps in.

“Oh, for God’s sake.  Why don’t you both just drop your pants and get it over with?”  She sounds as if she’s one very short step from throwing both of them out.  Interestingly, Ryan and Esposito have very subtly made it clear that they’re standing with Castle.  Seems like he really is part of this team.

Beckett calms the situation for the moment and starts to issue instructions.  Castle can see how the wind’s blowing, and is unsurprised when she turns to him to ask him to go home.  Always; first, last and only, the case.  And for once, because of the subject at hand, he’s not angered by it: she’s not, unlike all previous times, shutting him out.  She has to get this one right; if there’s anything that can be done to bring the child home safely she will do it.  And because he has a child, because he can imagine exactly what the parents are feeling, because he knows that if he ever lost Alexis he would never recover – he does what she asks, without a look or word or quibble.  It won’t be on him, if this goes wrong.  But there is one more thing he can do.  He flicks a glance at Sorenson, looks back at Beckett.

“Okay.” His tone conveys everything about the case that he can’t articulate in public.  “But if you need me, call.  Even if it’s just to talk.”  His eyes say _whatever you need, but you have to tell me you need it._   There’s a flash of recognition of the message, quick thanks, in Beckett’s face before she turns back to her case, already absorbed.  He knows she won’t be sleeping at home tonight.  The only question is whether it will be the break room couch or the Candela’s home or not at all. He’d bet on the last.  But he is a better man than he was even two weeks ago and he will do whatever it is she needs him to do to make this case end better.  However much he hates it.  Because he is not, and never will be, that other man.

He’s halfway home when he gets a text from Ryan.  It’s short and to the point. _Beckett’s just told Sorenson that you’re her partner.  We’d better get you a shield, man._   He reads it with some disbelief.

Beckett turns away from Castle back to the case and her focus on what they now need to do.  She’s snapping out her instructions, fully in command.  She doesn’t notice – and wouldn’t have cared about, or for, even if she had – Sorenson’s face turning darker and darker as she does.  When she tells him what’s next, he boils over.

“You don’t give the orders here, Kate” –

“ _Detective Beckett._ ” –

“I’m in charge of the investigation.  I’ll set out what’s to be done.  Step back.”

“No.  I’m on this task force because my team know how to do this better than anyone.  You let us work.  This is a team, and we’re all part of it.”

“At least you sent that civilian home.”  He can’t even use his name?  Sorensen’s really losing it.

“That civilian – _Castle_ – is a part of this team and my partner.  I only sent him home because this is the grunt work of being a cop.  He can’t access databases or run down security footage.  Oh – and because you don’t seem to be able to play nice.  I’m not having this case ruined because you can’t keep a lid on it.  So since I can trust _my partner_ ” – she puts considerable emphasis on those words, and completely misses Ryan and Esposito’s fist bump behind her – “to do what’s best for the case, not for his own ego, I asked him to step back.  Can you say you’d have done the same?   Because you didn’t last time, Agent.  Did you?”  She goes back to her orders.

“Right.  Ryan, Espo, let me know the minute you find anything.  Now, Agent, _we_ are going back to the Candela’s.”  There’s a bite in her voice.  She doesn’t even look behind her as she marches to the elevator.  Whether he follows or not doesn’t matter.  _Her_ team is going to make this work.  Make it right.

She’s wrung everything she can out of the Candelas, the living room, the window.  Everything.  And it’s not enough.  She wants Castle’s mind to think against, to rip out theories and take them apart.  But she had to send him home because Sorenson’s a jerk.  Maybe once she’s done everything she can swing by his apartment and get his thoughts.  She goes into the kitchen to make herself the latest of many cups of coffee, and is not happy to find Sorenson lurking there like a gremlin under a toadstool.  He should be doing something useful, not staring at the coffee.  She ignores him and reaches for the coffee herself.

“I don’t want that civilian involved.”

“That’s not your decision.  You want me on this case, you get my team too.”

“I can have him removed.”

“You can lose my team and lose this case, too.  Are you still so incapable of valuing _all_ the people around you that you’ll risk this child?  Again?  What’s your problem, Agent?” 

“He’s only here because he’s trying to get into your pants.  He’s not an asset, he’s a liability.  Following you around?  Yeah, right, Kate.  He just wants to fuck you, like any of his other bimbos, then he’ll walk.  And you’re such a wide-eyed fangirl you’ll let him.”

“You think I’d compromise a case for that?  That’s really what you think?  If the cap fits, _Agent_ ” – the contempt in her voice would fell mountains – “you wear it.  You compromised the last kidnap case we worked because you got jealous of my partner.  So you didn’t tell us what you knew and didn’t ask what we knew, and because of that we were too late.  Your misjudgement got that kid killed, and then you tried to blame my partner.  I might have coped with that, because mistakes happen under pressure, if you hadn’t made it clear you’d done it because you didn’t trust my judgement and you were going to make all the decisions for us whether you knew what you were doing or not.  You put your career and your ego ahead of the case and me.  And here you’re doing just the same again.”

Sorenson turns white with rage.  He takes a step closer to Beckett, who’s standing stiff and stark against the doorframe blazing with anger and contempt.  She doesn’t move.  No-one intimidates her, now.

“You need to lose the attitude, Agent.  We’ve got one chance to save this kid and I intend to take it.  What do you intend?”  The venom in her words is unmistakeable.  Sorenson takes another step closer to her.  Beckett is not entirely sure what he intends, but she’s not intending to back off.  She’d done it once, because she’d trusted him.  Never again.

“You don’t speak to me like that, Detective.”  He’s leaning in, far too close to her face for Beckett to appreciate.  She starts to gear up for …dissuasion.  However she needs to dissuade him.

“I’ll speak to you however I must to solve this case.”  He can’t get any closer without touching her, and Beckett abruptly realises that there’s unwanted desire flickering in his eyes.  She doesn’t flinch.  “If you get any closer you’ll be chewing your testicles like they were gum.”

Suddenly Sorenson raises his head.

“Just as well he’s turned up,” he hisses.

“Why?  I don’t need anyone’s help to deal with you.”

“She seemed to be doing just fine on her own,” Castle says coolly from the other door.  “I don’t think Beckett needs my help.”  She flicks her head round at his voice, and he sees a flash of – amazement? – across Beckett’s face.  He can’t tell whether it’s his words or his presence, or maybe both.  They hadn’t noticed him, but he’s been watching for the last couple of minutes.  Whatever it is, Castle isn’t sure _why_ Sorenson was about to put hands on Beckett, though he has some interesting ideas, but he’s damn sure he was, and although Beckett’s seriously tough and wholly vicious in sparring, Sorenson’s as big as Castle and Castle took her down, so Sorenson, being trained by the FBI, pretty certainly could too.  Then again, Castle hadn’t underestimated her.  Sorenson just might have, if he’d touched her.  But then, if he had, and by some miracle Beckett hadn’t taken him apart, Castle would have.  He’d learned to defend himself some time ago: went along with being able to protect Alexis, and he’d found that he enjoyed the training and the knowledge that he could do a lot more than people expected.  So he’d kept it up, and practised.  He’s extremely competent.  Anyway.  No-one lays unwanted hands on _his_ Beckett, and Castle can read the frustration and ill-suppressed desire written across Sorenson’s face as if it were a poster.  It’s unpleasantly familiar.  His angry jealousy, mostly burnt off by Ryan’s text, reasserts itself, and he takes no care at all to conceal his ability to intimidate. 

“Angela’s adopted,” he says.  Beckett looks up.  That sounds like one of Castle’s left field statements.  She raises a mental eyebrow when she sees Castle’s posture.  That’s right back to the looming bulk that he uses when he wants to impose himself on a situation.  It’s frighteningly effective.  It’s having an effect on Sorenson, too.  She doesn’t think Sorenson’s realised that he flinched when Castle made his presence known.  She also doesn’t think Sorenson knows he’s backing off.

“So?” she says, waiting for more.  She can feel Sorenson’s dislike tainting the air around them.  He’s still far closer than Beckett wants.  Castle, by contrast, is rather too far away.  She takes the opportunity to step away from Sorenson without it conveying any form of backing down.

“So prior to giving up her baby” – there’s a flare of disbelief that anyone would do that across Castle’s face – “the birth mother would’ve been given background on the Candelas.  Specifically, their ability to support the child.”  Left field indeed. 

“Knowledge of their finances,” Beckett says with satisfaction.  She opens her mouth to start on their normal practice of ripping into the theory when Sorenson speaks dismissively.

“We’re going to waste time on the insights of Nancy Drew?”  For God’s sake, Sorenson, leave it be, thinks Beckett.  Castle’s had a good idea, and you know it, so stop waggling your undersized dick and get to work.  She calls it in to Ryan and Esposito to start them on finding the birth mother.

There’s nothing more to be done here.  Time to leave the Candelas to whatever comfort they can find in each other, time to leave this apartment soaked in tension, testosterone and tragedy, time to hit the precinct.  Past time to leave Sorenson behind.

“Want a ride, Castle?” And this time, Beckett sees the swift, ugly flick of jealous anger across Sorenson’s face.  _Fuck_.  This is exactly what happened last time, and _exactly_ what she doesn’t need.  Fortunately she can trust Castle to do what’s best for the case.  He follows her out, and into the car, taking care not to touch her or stand too close where it might yet raise unwanted curiosity.

“Thanks,” she says, as she pulls out.  She can feel Castle’s questioning look.  “For leaving earlier, without a quibble.”

“A missing child’s just a little more important than my feelings.”  An unspoken tension dissolves upon the words, light as they are.  The meaning behind them is obvious.  It’s almost a cop statement, everything understood, nothing spoken.

“I need to go by the precinct, but then d’you want a drink?”  Castle hears what he thinks she isn’t saying: _I need downtime._   Try as he might, he can’t quite turn it into _I need you_ , but it’s a lot closer than it has been.  It soothes away all his jealousy and anger at Sorenson.  Watching Sorenson get far too close to Beckett had taken all his self-control: not to remove him by the neck; to let Beckett fight her own fights.  She’ll only stay close if he gives her room.  He can’t take care of her, shouldn’t take care of her, doesn’t need to take care of her.  He can’t show his possessiveness about her in public.  But shortly, he thinks, they won’t be in public.  The amount of tension and anger flooding from Beckett tells him that she’s only one short step from adrenaline-induced explosion – and while there are three ways that could manifest, he only intends that one of them should.  He’s not precisely calm either, and in defusing the primed Beckett bomb, he’ll defuse his own feelings.

“Okay.”

Ryan and Espo are swiftly dealt with, and their mild surprise at seeing Castle back again is well concealed as soon as they observe Beckett’s familiar, _this-case-is-not-going-well_ glare.  It’s the same one that they see every time they don’t close the case in twelve hours.  But for tonight, which is now pretty close to being tomorrow, everything that can be done has been done.  Though they think it’s as well that Sorenson didn’t return with Beckett too: he’s just the sort of self-important jerk who’d try to set them on useless busywork rather than a couple of hours’ sleep and start clean early tomorrow.  They leave, while Beckett’s still poking at papers on her desk, picking up and putting down, irritation at the lack of any clues fuelling her glare at her murder board.  She’s sitting, rigidly staring at it, kicking the base of the desk she’s perched on, when Castle comes to sit next to her.

“Want that drink now?”

“I want a lead.  A clue.” Frustration seethes in her voice and her body language.

“Maybe a drink, and kick everything around for a while, and something will pop.”  Castle does his best to phrase the suggestion so that she’ll leave, get some rest, some downtime: so that he can take care of her, and ease her strung out tension, and his.

“ ‘Kay.  Let’s go.  I’ve got some wine at home.  Can’t discuss something this sensitive in a bar.”  She’s wired, and she won’t sleep when she’s like this.  If they don’t go now, she knows that she won’t even try: she’ll maybe take an hour on the couch in the break room, maybe thump the daylights out of the punchbag, maybe just replace her blood with caffeine and keep going: anything to solve this one faster, sharper, simply _better_ than the last time.  (Maybe?  Maybe her ass.  Definitely.)  Every minute that passes reduces the chances for the child.  But she also knows that she has to wind down, try to step away, block the images from the previous case before they stop her being able to do her job the way she needs to.  She needs to forget for a little time now, to be able to remember everything she needs to tomorrow.  And the way to do that is standing right here with her. As long as he doesn’t ask her anything; as long as he waits for her to tell him the minimum she needs to say, to explain; as long as it’s about this case, but not about the rest of the past.  As long as she converts this roiling, clawing anger and frustration into hard focus on the case, and nothing else.

She doesn’t even see that she’s relying on Castle to bring her down, to bring her to a point where she can do her job to the best of her ability; trusting him to have her back and to help her.

To take care of her, in fact.


	51. Use a little muscle to get what I need

An hour later, and most of a bottle of wine drunk, Beckett’s gripping tension has not abated in the slightest and her temper is still burning as if it were ignited by rocket fuel.  No theory proposed has yielded anything that might, however tenuously, be a whisper of a lead; none of the evidence leads to anything new.  She’s stalking round the apartment, twisting her glass in her hands, ripping everything to bloody shreds like a tiger on a deer, a lace of anger hemming every word.  When she drains her glass and sharply sets it down, Castle rises from his seat, his own humming tension bleeding through the air, to prowl towards her.  Dark currents begin to flow around her, as he approaches. When he reaches her, he speaks.

“Come here.”  She turns to find him right beside her.

“I want to work it out, Castle,” she snaps.

“No.  Not now.”  He pulls her in and kisses her hard; no need to bend down far to take her mouth tonight: she’s close to his height with her heels still on.  When he lifts off the anger in her eyes is at least half altered to arousal.  “You’ve thought enough.  Time to stop fighting the case, for a little while.”  His voice turns deeper, darker.  “If you want to keep fighting, you’ll have to fight me.”  He kisses her again, roughly, the way he knows she likes, exerting just enough force to hold her in, not enough to prevent her pulling away if that’s her preference. 

She doesn’t.  She pulls his head down, arches in, searches his mouth with her tongue for a weakness that will let her take the advantage; rolls against him and feels the instant response; the swift slide of his hands to nape of neck and small of back, to press her in; to use body and muscle and mouth and hands to make her, help her, forget the case for a short while, the only way she can.  She pushes closer and brings her leg up so that she can rub over him, have him right where she needs him, trying to force him back to lean against the wall so she can take the friction she needs.  She reaches for his shirt, and he stops her, catches her wrists and takes her hands behind her back.

“Uh-uh.  You’ve been in charge all day.  Aren’t you tired of that now?”  Dark heat flickers behind her eyes, and she leans in to collect his lips.

“No…” she breathes out.  “You think you can be in charge, you have to take it.”  She needs to challenge, she needs the rough play that will force her to give in, give up, for the short time she has to take to reassert herself and close the case.  She tugs her hands sharply, surprises him enough by doing so that they’re freed, flicks his T-shirt up with the rat-a-tat staccato speed of machine gun fire before he pinions her again.  “You’re not doing too well with that idea, are you, Castle?”  He growls gently into her ear, nips sharply on her earlobe, soothes it with soft lips, shifts his mouth to tease the spot on her neck that makes her wriggle and shiver so that he holds her motionless against him and carries on there, till she starts to breathe faster, shallower, flexes her arms and tries to free her hands from the tighter grip.

 “Something you want, Beckett?”  He starts to slide her own T-shirt up over her waist slowly, sketching tiny patterns across her skin.  “Now who’s not doing so well?”  He takes the opportunity to finish pulling the T-shirt clear of her breasts and, leaving it there, starts on the fastenings of her pants, uses his free hand to push them down over her hips and puddle on the floor, leave her standing in heels and another set of _fuck-me_ underwear which her T-shirt isn’t covering.  “You seem to be trapped, Detective.  Looks like I’m in charge.”  This time when she snaps her wrists to try to free her hands nothing happens.  The heat between her legs builds, and she steps into him, arches closer, glides her body over him with the boneless grace of a Siamese cat and Castle gasps and grinds into her in his turn.

“Something _you_ want, Castle?”  His own words, turned back on him.  Oh, yes, something he wants.  Fierce possessive need springs up in him and he shoves her T-shirt over her head and swiftly over her arms, leaving it on the floor and re-imprisoning her hands before she reacts.

“This is what I want.  You.”  He wraps his free arm around her, leans in and very slowly bends her back  over his arm just as he had previously, giving himself full access to her breasts in their thin silk covering, not needing to hold her hands now that she’s positioned like this.  But he has to check.  Even now, even where she’s invited it, even as part of the game.  “What do you want, Beckett?  Tell me.  You can’t have it if you don’t ask.”

“Kiss me, Castle.”  Even through her angry, spiking arousal, she recognises the need for her to agree overtly.  “Touch me.”

“Still wanting to be in charge?”  He traces his tongue wetly over each soft mound, dampening the silk so it clings more closely to her skin, worries the fabric so it strokes across her and hardens her nipples, points them toward him.  She gasps.  “I don’t think you get to be in charge.”  He plays a little, biting, teasing, winding her higher.  Gasp shifts towards soft whimper.  “I don’t think you want to be.”  He’s standing upright, looking down, when Beckett brings her shoulders and head up in a move a gymnast would envy and is suddenly standing.

“Says who, Castle?”  His own T-shirt is whipped off, while he’s still faintly wondering how many sit-ups and crunches it takes to be able to come back up like that, and quick fingers trace over his zip, pleased inchoate noises following when she skims the hard outline beneath.  It’s all it takes to ignite the tension and turn it all to frantic, desperate, arousal.  All Castle’s jealousy-fuelled lust takes over and all he wants, needs, to do is show her that she’s _his_ ; that no glossy Fed is going to get in the way; that he’s the only man she’s going to need or want.  Only him.  He hauls Beckett tightly against him, takes her mouth ruthlessly and pulls one long leg up around him so she can roll in and can’t mistake how he feels when he answers in kind.  He slides one hand across her ass and through her legs to stroke over damp silk and heat, slipping under the fabric to tease through the slick flesh hard enough to make her hips jerk into his hand, cupping her till she grinds frantically against him and he slides harder, faster over the wet heat and pushes two wicked fingers into her, flicks his thumb over her and she shatters in his grasp.

He doesn’t pause, simply picks Beckett up while she’s still shuddering and carries her to the bed, pushes her on to it, presses her shoulders against the pillows, watches her eyes bleed into the dark green-black of grass at nightfall and takes her mouth once more, biting on her lip, dominating and heavy and sure. 

She pulls him down over her, nails biting into his back, and he lets her, lets her strip him, lets her roll him over till she’s above him and smiling triumphantly.  “I think I’m in charge.  Again.”

He smiles up at her very lazily.  “You like quotations, Beckett.”  She nods, slightly disconcerted by the total change of subject.  “Here’s one for you that you obviously don’t know.  Sun Tzu, The Art of War.  ‘Let your enemy defeat himself.’”  He pulls her to him, rolls her on to her back without her being able to offer the slightest hindrance and lies over her, pinning her down.  “Now I don’t need to take my attention off you for any reason.  How long do you think you can keep fighting to stay in charge if I’m paying full attention, Beckett?”  His smile shifts to wickedly, darkly seductive and he moves slightly to one side, trails delicate fingers down across her stomach and over her so she squirms under his hand and then moves more as his lips follow.  He knows what she wants, hard and fast and rough, again: any moment now she’ll try to take control, take them there.  But that’s not the only way to defuse the Beckett bomb.  He turns his concentration to the gentle laving of tongue, soft kisses, gentle strokes; until she moans softly and tries to move, and then he holds her still and works her harder; not yet providing what she wants.  She attempts to take more, tries to pull him to her breasts, to bring his hard body against hers: she needs him deep inside her, filling her full enough to take away the memories.  To make her forget the times before, and the man she found she couldn’t trust.  She doesn’t think about why Castle might make her forget that man’s betrayals.

“I’ll set the pace, Beckett.  Just stop fighting me, and let go.”  He smiles darkly against her thigh.  “It’ll be what you need.”  He nips over her hipbone, slips fingers over the silk she’s still wearing, blows across it and watches her writhe, moves back up to undo her bra and remove it; licks and kisses and then sucks on the taut nipples revealed, listening to her moan, pressing hard weight against her through her panties. He slides them off, takes her hands in one of his to pin them above her head and settles between her legs, his bulk imprisoning her.  She tries to rub against him, whimpers when she can’t. 

“More, Castle.”

“No silk tonight, no handcuffs.  Just me, Beckett; only me, holding you down, keeping you still, till I allow you to move.  It’s what you want, how you like it, how you need it,” he murmurs, sinful knowledge spilling on to her.

He slides over her, hard and hot, teasing through the slick folds.  “You don’t give in, till you’re made to.  That’s why you like this.  You need someone who can make you give in.  And that’s me.”  He sees the argument already rising in her throat, and kisses her hard to cram it back down.  “You never let go till the fight’s over.”  He has a sudden blinding realisation.  “If you win, you just move on, straight to the next battle.  You do it every day.  Your whole life is a fight.  You _can’t_ let go.  You don’t walk away from the fight until you’ve won or you’re ordered to or you’ve lost.”

She shakes her head in protest. She doesn’t want dissected, analysed, or so clearly understood.  But then she sees the heat and lust (and something more, that she doesn’t recognise) on Castle’s face, above her.

“I’ll give you what you need.  You know I can.  You can fight as hard as you like, as you need to, with me.  Just like you do.  But when the fighting’s over I’ll still be here.  Just like now, I’ll be on top and you’ll feel very, very happy about that, Beckett.”  He moves slightly and halts, just at her entrance.  “You want me to, don’t you?  You want to be taken.”  He moves again.  “Say it, Beckett.  You have to say it.  You need to say it.”  And it’s not clear to her whether she needs to say it because he insists and she needs him inside her _right now_ and he won’t if she doesn’t say it, or because she needs to admit to herself that he’s in control so that she can lose herself in the motion and the moment and not need to think about keeping herself safe or apart.

“Take me, Castle.  Now.”  And in the hard thrust of his body into her she lets go and gives in, gives up control, and forgets all the betrayals before now in the muscle and the movement and release.

Afterwards, for the first time ever she curls into the crook of his arm and the warmth of his body before he can tuck her in, head on his chest, arm across him, soft and pliant and relaxed.  He strokes softly over her back, holding her close, not, yet, trying to arouse her again, and the contented noise that she produces definitely, he thinks, qualifies as a purr.  _His_.  Pliant and purring and open and _his_.

Finally, she’s come to him.

* * *

 

Beckett’s alarm wakes her frighteningly early: her need to get back to the case pushing her onward, through her routine and out the door to the precinct.  Castle had left, at her – explained - request, before she slept: she’d have preferred he stayed but that’s a step too far; asking him to stay, that’s a request, tonight, to _take care_ of her that she won’t make, can’t make.  And she’d slept just fine, without him, as well as she usually does in the middle of a difficult case.  She’d only woken three times, in the five hours she’s slept.  (She carefully prevents herself remembering that when he’d stayed after the terrorist case, she’d slept right through without waking till morning.)

“Where’s your Feebie friend, Beckett?” Espo’s insinuating tone cuts through the fog of early bullpen chatter and Beckett’s absorption in the detail of the case.

“Maybe he’s gone for breakfast with Castle,” Ryan grins.  “I’m sure they’re gonna be best pals in no time.”  He smirks.

“Yeah, they’ll be trading baseball cards and phone numbers and sinking beers together all night.”  Beckett looks askance at both men.

“Jealous that your friend Castle might be hanging out with someone else?  I’m sure you two could tag along.  You can all bond over Ryan’s tie collection.”  Espo sniggers.  Ryan droops, wounded, like a sad basset hound.

Satisfied that she’s squashed the boys from going after any difficult issues – at least where she might hear them and have to keep a poker face – Beckett re-absorbs herself in the case and the detail of the birth mother, who’ll be in Interrogation by the time civilised people start their day.  She reaches for another jolting dose of concentrated caffeine, her sleep-substitute of choice, and necessity.  She’s been here well over an hour already, and it’s barely closing on eight.

Ryan wanders off to the break room for his second coffee of the morning, followed by Esposito.  They were in just after half-past seven, as focused as Beckett on making this come out right.

“What’s up with that Feeb anyway?” asks Ryan.  “Apart from the stick up his ass.  He looks at Beckett like she’s…” He looks at the idea unrolling in his head with some horror.  “He looks at her like she’s a woman.”  Espo laughs derisively.

“Yeah, bro, that’s ‘cause she _is_ a woman.”  Ryan shakes his head.

“Not like that.  An’ nobody in this bullpen looks at her like that.  ‘Cept Castle.  Well, _yes_ Sorenson looks at her like that, but somethin’ else too.  Like he don’t have to pay as much attention to her because she’s a woman.”  Espo first looks annoyed, then amused, then annoyed again.

“Don’t see Beckett puttin’ up with that for long.  She sure didn’t yesterday, did she?”  He sniggers nastily. Espo’s not that keen on Feebies to start with (though he tries not to call them Feebles where anyone might hear) and he hadn’t taken to Sorenson at all.  “Didya see his face when she said Castle was her partner?  I’ve seen less green on a Packers linebacker.  I think that Feebie’s lookin’ for more than just Beckett’s cop brains.”  It’s Ryan’s turn to smirk nastily.

“Should be interesting.  Castle’s not gonna like that.”  Espo smirks in return.  At which point the coffee’s done and it’s time to stop flapping jaws and get back to the detail.

The birth mother is no help.  Her supposed petition for details of the child’s adoptive parents was forged, and they let her go: their last lead the father.  He’s not happy to see them, tries to run, stopped by the combined presence of Ryan, Esposito and Castle. The boys take over; cuffing him.

Beckett forestalls Sorenson’s attempt to join her with a sharp gesture and sharper words.  He won’t help here, and she doesn’t want him near her.  She has no confidence at all in his ability to stay second to her (he hadn’t done before, and he hadn’t done yesterday) but though he clearly hates the direct order that she takes no trouble at all to disguise, for once he does it.  She breathes a hidden sigh of relief and goes to do what she does best, alpha interrogation, from the hard clack of her heels to her poise and posture, standing tall and radiating confidence.  But this man doesn’t need intimidated, he needs cajolement.   She can do that too, it’s just a little tweak to the confidence, a tiny softening of her voice, a tiny bend towards him and the understanding glistening in her eyes. 

Castle, half-watching Beckett work the suspect, half-aware of Sorenson’s predatory gaze toward her, consciously pulls on his superstar status and an air of smug, superior satisfaction with life, and oozes up to him.  He just stands there, annoyingly silent and arrogant, letting the attitude fill the air around him, and waits for it to have its inevitable effect on the Fed.  It doesn’t take much time for Sorenson to open the next front in the hostilities.

“You’re jealous.  That I hooked her.”  Well, Castle would definitely prefer that there wasn’t a history between them, but he’s hardly a blushing virgin, so he’s certainly not in a position to – nor will he – object to Beckett’s past.  Especially as the preferences her past have left her with so exactly match his own.  A sudden memory of Beckett and silk scarves adds an extra edge to his next words.

“What’s there to be jealous of?  You couldn’t reel her in.”  He follows up with an entirely wolfish smile: Casanova Castle, _I’ve-had-more-women-than-you’ve-jerked-off_  heavily dosed with _she-won’t-resist-me-no-woman-does_.  No.  Not more than she usually does, anyway.  Sorenson’s expression turns ugly as he takes the meaning Castle intends, and as soon as Beckett’s finished with the suspect – leaving Ryan and Espo to bring him in – Sorenson’s off.  Castle prowls after Beckett to her cruiser, smirking, and making sure that Sorenson sees his gait.  So far, although he’d have _preferred_ to waken to Beckett in his bed (or hers) and in his arms, it’s already been a pretty good day.

“Sorenson looked a little pissed as he left, Castle.  What did you do?”

“Nothing,” Castle says blandly.  “Talking about the weather.”  Beckett looks at his smug smile and disbelieves him on general principles, all the way back to the Twelfth.

It becomes a less good day when the birth father’s alibi checks out.  Sorenson’s not minded to accept it; won’t trust the team’s answers; won’t, it’s clear, trust Beckett’s call.  He may have said he thinks she’s the best in the city, but he sure isn’t acting like it.  Castle’s antennae twitch.  Quietly, unobtrusively, he starts to pay attention, stalking this odd intonation and interaction, putting it together with the _there-there_ tone from the previous day, the way Sorenson had leaned into her, the history between them.  But when Sorenson insists on an ESU sweep despite the alibi, Beckett boils over.

“We’re at square freaking one, and we got nothing.  You can send ESU wherever you want.  I’m not losing this one.”  She storms off into the bullpen, out for anything that will help solve this, or someone’s blood, whichever comes first.  Just for a moment, Castle and Sorenson look at each other and recognise the same feeling – complete astonishment at the depths of Beckett’s personal commitment to the case.  Castle seizes the opportunity to find out what’s going on, from someone who isn’t part of the precinct, before this shared moment of bemused maleness in the face of furious female disperses.

“What did she mean “not losing this one”?”

“The case we worked.”

“I thought you got the guy.”

“We did...but the kid was already dead.”

Ah.  So that’s it.  Not, this time, merely failing to catch the killer, watching the case grow cold, which is bad enough, but catching the killer too late to save the child.  No wonder this one’s hitting hard.  The last was only gruesome, this one reminds her of failure.  Castle knows what that feels like, and knows what’s driving her now.  So much worse, when failure equals death.  He expects that somewhere deep inside, she still blames herself.  ( _It’s not your fault, Ricky.  Don’t worry, kiddo._ )  Hm.  There had been an interesting flash of – humiliated discomfort? – across Sorenson’s face, too.  Hm.


	52. You can be the hero

There’s been another ransom demand.  It’s back to the Candela’s home: everything they’re worth in piles of dollar bills on the table; a very specific type of backpack to put it in.  It’s all starting to break down: the parents fighting, blaming each other, tempers shortening with every minute their daughter has been missing.  Test and counter-test; mistrust and misunderstanding: but the child is still alive.  So far. Now to deliver the ransom payment.  No cops.  No agents.  Or the girl dies.

Sorenson’s going to take it himself, despite the demands, till the father puts his foot down and refuses.  The father’s not capable, however, still too fragile, incapable of holding himself together.  There’s no other option, though. Until Castle volunteers.

“What?” Beckett sounds shocked.  Not, however, appalled.  Sorenson looks appalled, but Castle suspects that’s because he wants to play the hero himself.  And sure, that’s a small part of what Castle’s doing, but the much bigger part of him, the part that he’s let develop, or maybe that he’s released, since he watched Beckett and her team taking on the bad guys without hesitation: that part tells him he’s got a child; he knows how he’d feel if he were this broken, grieving, guilty man; and he’s not an agent, not a cop, and gives no-one any excuse to kill the girl.  So it has to be him.  There is no-one else.

Sorenson is predictably unhappy.  It turns into a contest of wills between Sorenson and Beckett.  No question who’s going to win that one, but Sorenson has still got the same peculiar reaction to Beckett taking charge that he’d displayed earlier.  Castle abruptly places it as _me-Tarzan-you-Jane_ and sniggers internally.  He’d pay serious money to watch this show, though he wouldn’t need to place a bet on the outcome.  Disappointingly, at least from Castle’s viewpoint, (he’d wanted to watch the flaying he was sure Beckett was going to deliver) Sorenson backs off, again.  He’d done that with the birth father, too.  He parks that whole interaction and what it tells him about Beckett for later consideration.

Beckett’s quietly unhappy about Castle doing this.  He’s not supposed to get involved in operations, certainly not doing more than shadowing her, but there isn’t any other choice.  If she’d thought about it, though, she would have known to expect this.  He hadn’t faltered under the bullets, so why wouldn’t he volunteer here?  She snarks as normal, while he’s being wired up and complaining about the tech’s cold hands, to hide any semblance of concern.   When the tech goes, though, Castle looks at her and notices her tension, tries to reassure her, loses that in another cloud of snark and orders.  But as he exits Beckett manages to slip a swift hand over his, fast reassurance for him in his turn.

The drop is made, but the clever use of crowd art with dozens of similar backpacks (no wonder it was such a specific instruction, thinks Beckett bleakly) means that no-one gets a look at who picks it up.  Washout, and the Candelas are $750,000 down.  Though at least Castle wasn’t mistaken for a cop, or an agent, so there’s more chance (though that’s slipping away by the minute, if this follows pattern) that the little girl is still alive.  And… Castle’s done something clever.  He’s slipped the phone into the backpack and sent Beckett a text (she reads it and struggles not to blush: it simply says _It’s worth letting me take charge_ ) and thereby ensured they can trace the kidnappers’ location.  She could kiss him.  Not in public, though.  She’ll save that for later.  She looks at Sorenson’s face and notes the annoyance there.  Still not playing nice: he could at least have said _well done_ , or something similar.

Beckett drifts off into a quiet reverie, comparing Castle’s behaviour with Sorenson’s, much to Sorenson’s detriment.  It’s odd that Castle, just as alpha and forceful as anyone around, doesn’t see the need to emphasise his masculinity by second-guessing her, nor does he interfere in the way she does her job, whilst Sorenson can’t seem to get his stupid fat head round the idea that she knows best.  She wonders, for the first time, whether she was just unlucky: that it isn’t every relationship that has to involve overbearing control, or see her as a weak victim, but were only hers.  It’s not as if she’s got a large sample to draw conclusions from.  She wanders over to Castle, who’s being de-wired and looking seriously at a photo of the girl, obviously mapping his own feelings, if it were ever to happen to his daughter, on to the parents.  Unusually, when he looks at her there’s none of the normal flirtatiousness that he displays in public, or the heat that he generates when either no-one’s looking or there’s no-one else around.  This case may have hit her hard, but Castle’s hardly been unaffected either.  She considers the position, and is just slipping into smooth satisfaction that the Feds will, surely, locate the phone and the kidnapper and the child this afternoon, pick them up: they’ll have closed the case.  If that’s done, then she thinks that a drink with the team followed by an investigation of the more interesting, and dangerous, areas of their interlocking desire might wrap the day up in a way guaranteed to let her forget kidnaps, and Sorenson’s attitude, and men she found she couldn’t trust. 

Silk and steel edge into her mind, and her posture changes very slightly, she unconsciously lets the aura around her include dark, forbidden sexuality, flaring a little hotter.  Castle reacts, suddenly distracted from the photo; bigger, harder edged, dangerous.  Tension crackles, raw desire starts to build.  Anticipation is already scenting the air.  Hot glances ricochet between them: Beckett’s stance shifts to scream _I-dare-you_ ; Castle’s conveys _you’ll surrender, and you’ll enjoy it_.

And then Sorenson enters: his body language and face showing clearly that there’s a problem.  The atmosphere changes instantly.  The Feds have lost the signal: the phone’s been found and switched off, before they were close enough.  Beckett slumps, defeated for the moment.

“If they can’t find the kidnappers, I need to start again.  Everything the Candelas know, maybe there’s something they don’t know they know” –

“Unknown unknowns, Rumsfeld?”  Castle says.  That raises a tiny smirk, swiftly falling again.

“C’mon.  Let’s start talking to them again.  Maybe there’s more.  Maybe I’ve missed something.”  But she doesn’t sound convinced: a note of frantic searching underpinning her tone; the usual edge of confidence ragged.  She’ll need to question everything, all over again, trying to elicit any clue, any further scrap of information that might find this child.  Every second, every minute that she doesn’t find it is another step to tragedy.  They’re running out of time, and she knows it: over 24 hours now, and the area is too big to search in time, nothing now to narrow it down except her abilities and focus: her obsession with the case and the truth and the answer.

But repeated questioning, every angle, every instant, every word or sound or tremor in the air, extracts nothing new.  Castle, listening carefully and watching with hard concentration for any hitch or hesitation or hint that there is something more, detects nothing that Beckett hasn’t already covered, that they don’t already know.  All there is to find is more stress: another marital row appears imminent. 

Sorenson’s stayed back, away from Beckett’s stretched-thin patience; the volcanic frustrated fury just below the surface, tinged with the fear that she won’t be in time, won’t succeed, will only end up standing over the small body of another dead child; that she’ll have failed, again.  He’s staying back, too, from Castle’s fierce intelligence and penetrating looks: recognising, very belatedly, that in this they are working perfectly in harmony; synchronised in a way that means, Sorenson thinks bitterly, that this _civilian_ really is Beckett’s partner.  Officially or not.  He returns to the techs and the electronic data, with the sour taste of knowing that he’s lost his chance in the back of his throat, and the even more acidic knowledge that he’s consistently underestimated Beckett (and her pet civilian), and that’s _why_ he’s lost his chance.

But there is nothing more.  It doesn’t matter how she questions, for how long, how hard or how soft or how empathetic or how intimidating.  There is nothing there.  But she can’t leave.  She can’t go: needs to stay, to search, to examine the scene, to be doing something, anything, to block out the feeling of failure.  Sorenson and the techs leave, having sucked every bit and byte of data out of every phone and piece of electronics that the Candelas possess; taken every sample from their home that can be taken.  Beckett’s alone in the little girl’s bedroom, standing silently, trying to absorb from the stagnant air of an unoccupied room anything that might help.  Castle enters, shuts the door quietly and, instead of his initial impulse to wrap her in and provide forgetfulness in the only way she’ll accept, waits to be noticed, taking photos of the room while he does.  Forgetfulness, however necessary it may become, is clearly not wanted, and any demonstration of desire will not be welcomed.  Beckett’s obsessions won’t turn to him, tonight, and however much he wants and needs her to recognise that they have far more, already, than a work partnership; that their minds and bodies match; simply that she’s _his_ , no arguments, no escape, no others – this is not the time.  But soon.  Very, very soon.  Because somewhere in the annealing fire of this case, she’s accepted him as her partner.  She just doesn’t admit that it isn’t only for the job.  He understands, vaguely, that he’s still obsessed with her, her brain and her body and her passions; that he’s drowned far deeper than ever before.

He entirely fails to understand what that actually means.

* * *

 

Beckett notices Castle, eventually.  There’s nothing to be learned in the still air of this room, but maybe if she looks for long enough there’ll be a clue.  Please God, let there be a clue.  She can’t face failing again.

“You okay?”  It skirts the edge of her rules, dances on the line and doesn’t quite fall to the wrong side.

“Yeah.”  Pause.  “Probably.”  Pause.  “I gotta find something.   I can’t lose this one.  We’ve still got nothing, and time’s running out on me.”  She stops, breathes.  “I lost the last one.  I didn’t find the information soon enough, didn’t connect the dots fast enough.  When we got there the child was already dead.”  She sees it in her mind, again, the small, bloodied, bare body abandoned on the cold floor, as if it were trash.  “Telling the parents was the worst thing I’ve ever had to do.  I don’t wanna be there again.”  She paces, caged predator, prowl and turn and prowl again, up and down the room; looking for solutions, absolution.  Solving this one, to make up for her failure on the last.  Solving this one, because she won’t allow herself to consider that there is any other outcome.  But each tick of the clock in her mind tells her she’s losing the race.  “I gotta find something,” she repeats, her words dying away as her hope is.

On the next turn she crashes into Castle, who’s deliberately stepped into her path.  She scowls up at him.  “I need to think.  Don’t get in my way.”  He prevents her moving, hands on her shoulders, speaks before she objects.

“Stop.  Just for a moment.  You need to do what you need to do.  Is there anything I can do?  Because if not, I don’t think you need me here.”  He takes a breath.  The child counts for so much more than what he wants.  “I don’t think you want me here.  So I’ll go home, and see you in the morning.”

“Go.”  She’s fast to answer, definite.  “I need the space to think.”  But she leans against him, only for  a second, barely long enough to register if he weren’t so attuned to her.  He doesn’t think she hears him leave, returning to pacing as soon as he’s out of her path.

Hours later, Beckett’s no nearer a breakthrough, sitting in a rocking chair that she’s swinging with one foot, unable to settle or be still, chilled in the night air and by her lack of progress.  She reviews everything, again and again, but nothing is there.  Finally, defeatedly, she closes her eyes for a time, hoping that rest will provide an answer.  Yet it doesn’t, only unremembered, unrefreshing dreams, brief wakenings with faint memories of horror.

* * *

 

A soft noise wakes her: the sound of someone being very quiet.  It’s Castle, searching the bed, telling her to go back to sleep.  That’s too late, she’s already awake: needs to do more, find more, work this case harder.  Except Castle, from the vantage point of parenthood, has spotted something.  She resents, just for a moment, the experience that’s led him to the solution: she’s the cop, she should be able to solve this – but she’s not Sorenson, she’s not going to reject an idea just because it wasn’t invented here, and she’s seen enough of Castle’s irritating theories turn out to be right to ignore this one.  They pull it around like taffy for a few moments, the minimum possible to ensure they’re not overlooking something obvious, and then get Sorenson on the quiet.  It’s looking horribly as if this was family, or a very close contact: someone who knew about the child’s comfort bunny, and took it with the child.  Sorenson disgorges the sister’s address without a single raised eyebrow, and much to Beckett’s surprise doesn’t try to second-guess or minimise the idea.  She wonders idly what’s changed, as they pull out on the way to the sister’s house, all three of them in one car and no fighting or tension.  Maybe it’s just that this isn’t going to be the same tragic ending.  Ryan and Esposito will be joining them at the scene, just in case of trouble.

There is no trouble with the sister.  They arrest her – Sorenson has to take the collar, because it’s a Federal case – and Beckett collects the little girl, and the rabbit.  Castle and Sorenson share a brief moment of appreciative male fellow feeling, watching Beckett with a toddler and her toy in her arms, petting the little girl and just for once without her hard shell.  It’s very quickly replaced by considerable, antler-locking tension.  Castle identifies the look in Sorenson’s eyes without the slightest difficulty as the same possessive instinct that he sees in his own, though there’s still a difference that he can’t pin down.  He walks off to follow Beckett, Sorenson not letting him have even half a step’s lead, (nor vice versa.  Not that it’s a competition.  Oh no. Because he’s already won.)

Trouble hits shortly after they take the small girl home.  Her father’s delighted.  Her mother, well, not so much.  And then, in the course of a lacerating row, bitterness flooding the floor, it all spills out: the mother had staged the whole affair to avoid alimony.  All Beckett remembers, as she leaves with Castle and Sorenson flanking her like bodyguards, is the father saying pathetically _How could you hate me so much?_ and the mother replying _You made it easy._   Better to stay uninvolved, half out the door, than be reduced to that.  Better to avoid deep relationships, and endings, and too much care.  Just what she’s doing, in fact: indulging her darker side, fulfilling her midnight desires, with someone who’s perfectly prepared to be as involved as she is: that is, not wholly.  Trust, yes, she has to be able to trust him; on the job and in bed, but otherwise it’s all controlled, within boundaries.  That had been her previous mistake.  She’d found he couldn’t be trusted and she hadn’t set boundaries. 

* * *

 

The journey back to the precinct is quiet.  Beckett ignores the testosterone levels, rising with every cross-street, and refuses to talk.  When they arrive in the bullpen she buries her head in the paperwork and continues to ignore both men.

Castle goes to the break room to make himself a coffee and consider how best to extract the information he wants from Sorenson – and no less, how best to deliver the message that if Sorenson wants another chance at Beckett he, Castle, has every intention of ensuring Sorenson fails.  Castle hasn’t gone to all this effort to catch and keep Beckett (even if she doesn’t admit it yet) to lose her to some square-jawed poster-boy agent who screwed her up in the first place.  He doesn’t share, or give up, his partner.  Beckett, while he isn’t stupid enough to think of her as a possession, is quite definitely _his_.  And she’s staying his, for as long as she wants to be.

“You must be pretty happy with the day.”  A bitter voice comes from behind him.  Ah.  Sorenson’s looking for a fight.  Castle turns round and smiles sunnily, though there are sharp teeth concealed in it.

“Good result all round, surely?  The child was alive, after all.”  That’s none too delicately edged, and Castle follows it up with another sharp stiletto.  “We all worked together and it got to the right place.”  Sorenson winces, inadvertently.  And another.  “Teamwork, and respecting each other’s capabilities.”  Castle can produce management bull-speak till it comes out his ears.  He’s heard it all.  Sorenson winces again.  “And of course, Beckett’s a brilliant cop.  Best law-enforcement officer I’ve ever met.”  And another stab.  Emphatically not in the dark.  “Funny how so many top investigators are women.  Sorta gives the lie to anyone who’d be stupid enough to take view that the NYPD is sexist, doesn’t it?”  He turns back to the machine.

“What’s she told you?”

“Who?”

“Detective Beckett.  What did she say about the previous case?”

“Nothing.  You told me everything I needed to know.”  Castle weighs his options for reducing Sorenson to nothing without resorting to physical violence.  He thinks he can take him, but it might be messier than he’d like, and he might lose.  Though he’d definitely be prepared to give it a go.  He suspects that Sorenson’s underestimated him, just like Beckett did, once upon a time.

“I told you nothing.”

“Wanna bet?” Castle throws out casually.  “I bet $10 that I can tell you how it went down.”

“Ten?  That all you make from your books?”

“We can make it any number you like up to a hundred thousand, but I don’t like taking too much from the FBI.  You might try for a RICO investigation.  Are you a sore loser, Sorenson?”

“No.”  That’s a lie, if ever Castle heard one.  “Make it a hundred dollars.  Makes it interesting, and I’ll put your cash towards taking Beckett out for dinner.”  Castle conceals his rush of fury.  Sorenson is _not_ taking Beckett anywhere.  “Go ahead, make my day.”

“So you and Beckett were dating.”  Castle manages not to put any inflection on that, but he’s taking up a lot more space than usual.  “And you caught a kidnapping case: six year old child.  Beckett and the team she was with then did the cop work; you had just become an agent.  So you were supposed to lead the team, as the resident Fed.  How’m I doing so far?”

“So far, so accurate,” Sorenson grits out. 

“Beckett was the only woman on the team, and she led the cops.  Didn’t she?” Sorenson nods, a tiny twist to his mouth telling Castle he’s on the right track.  “You were trying to prove yourself in the Bureau, show that you’d got what it took to do it.  You needed to succeed.”  He looks Sorenson up and down, contempt flickering in his gaze.  “So you thought you could do it alone.  You didn’t tell Beckett’s team what you knew, you just took what they knew.  And when Beckett suggested a different course of action you dismissed it.”  His voice has got harder as he goes.  “Because you didn’t believe she could know better than you. You couldn’t accept that a younger woman cop, who’d herself been a victim, once, could out-think a male Fed.  But if you had, you might have found the child in time.”  His voice drops to a biting coldness.  “You were dating her, and you couldn’t see how good a cop she was – _is_ – because of her past, and because you were dating.  And based on how you’ve been behaving, you were jealous of any man on her team, too, so you tried to shut them out.  So you caught the killer, but lost the child.  That same day, I guess she ditched you.” 

Sorenson is staring at him, acid bitterness splashed across his face.  He doesn’t say a word.  He pulls out his wallet, flicks off five twenties, slaps them on the counter, and walks out.  Castle hears his voice at Beckett’s desk, but not the words, the sharp tones of a tired, irritated Beckett, and then, a few moments later, the elevator bell.


	53. Do bad things to you

When Sorenson exits the break room, clearly badly shaken and very angry, the last thing that Beckett wants is another discussion with him.  She hasn’t missed one iota of his clear desire to take up where they left off (some hope, she thinks.  No way.) nor of his jealousy.  She’s not interested.  He thumps down into the chair beside her desk, (she tries, still, not to think of it as Castle’s chair) exuding annoyance and not a little – fright?  Really?  What on earth has just happened?  She continues to attend to the paperwork.  Eventually he gets round to speaking.  He really didn’t need to.

“Guess that’s it, then.”  Beckett looks up.

“Yeah.  Case closed.”

“Want to go for a drink?”  Beckett’s face freezes, just for an instant.

“No.”  She doesn’t bother softening the refusal.  “My team closed this case.  You aren’t offering to buy for all of them, are you?”  Her clear eyes see straight through him, and Sorenson drops his own gaze before her.  “Instead, you can owe us – the team – a favour.  Never know when we might need a little help from the Feds.”  Sorenson nods, slowly.

“Kate…”

“Yeah?”  It’s sharp, and clear that Beckett wants to get back to completing the post-case administration.

“I… I’m sorry.”  He stands as quickly as he’d rushed the words out and leaves, much to Beckett’s unconcealed relief.  She can’t see why he should think that she’d want to go for a cosy drink with him.  Especially as there’s a better alternative, should she want a cosy drink with anyone.  Which right now she doesn’t.  She wants to finish the paperwork.  Well.  She doesn’t.  She wants something else entirely.  But she needs to finish, to put this case tidily behind her, close it off on her desk and in her head.  That way, she’ll remember the success when she sleeps tonight.  She concentrates hard and starts to make rapid progress.

Castle stays in the break room for a few moments more after he hears the elevator bell, drinking his coffee, planning the next move.  He doesn’t think that Sorenson will be casually dropping by any more.  He tucks his winnings into his wallet with intense satisfaction.  He, Castle, may have been seen around the town with a succession of pretty, plastic women, but he finds it very difficult to understand a mindset that will regard a woman as less capable just because you’re dating them.  Or – had it been?  Isn’t it much more likely that Sorenson would regard Beckett as less capable because she’d been a victim?  Or maybe it’s both.  Hm. 

An unusual niggle of worry creeps into his mind.  He’s looking into Beckett’s mother’s case.  He’s not pulling a similar trick, is he?  He thinks about what he’s doing.  He’s not talking to her about it – check – she told him not to talk to her about her past.  He’s looking for information.  Come to think of it, he should give Clark a call.  That’s OK, he thinks with satisfaction.  He’s looking for information that he can then give to Beckett, and then she can decide what to do.  That’s not interfering in her life, that’s letting her make her own decisions.  As long as he doesn’t do what he’d originally planned: solve it for her, it’ll be fine.  He can see that solving it for her would actually be unwanted interference.  He’s on the right side of the line. The niggle disappears.

When Castle exits the break room in his turn, Beckett’s still bent over the paperwork, the others long gone, the bullpen empty and shadowed except at her desk.

“Agent Sorenson gone?” 

“Yes.” 

Castle avoids making provocative comments such as _Good._ Or _I hope he didn’t ask you out_?  Or _I’m not sharing you with that idiot_.  None of those would be helpful, or necessary, though they’re all accurate reflections of how he feels.  There are other admissions that Beckett can make that will achieve the same objective: quashing his jealousy.  _Yours_ is a pretty good start, for that part, preferably in bed.  Though come to think of it, he’d be pretty happy if she admitted that outside bed.  He recalls that she’s openly described him as her partner, and lets that satisfy his possessive streak for the moment.

“How long will that take?”  He gestures at the papers and the screen.  Beckett scrunches her nose up in quick estimation.

“About an hour.  Maybe less, if I don’t make too many typing errors.”  Castle had rather acquired the impression that Beckett doesn’t tolerate errors.  Typing or otherwise.

“Less, then,” he smiles smugly.  “When you’re done, would you like to get some dinner?”  Beckett considers.  Eating is probably a good plan, though she’ll eat if she goes home, from one of her extensive collection of take-out menus.  She also remembers that it’s about time she paid.  She isn’t one of those women who expect to be taken out.

“Let’s see how I feel when I’m done.”  She looks him straight in the eye.  “My turn this time.”

“Sure,” says Castle amiably.  “Happy to be taken to dinner.  Though I meant why not come to mine and I’ll cook.”  Beckett raises a cool eyebrow.

“For a family meal?  Like the last time I came round?  I don’t think so.”

A note of irritation flicks through Castle’s breath.  Not for the first time, his mother is messing up what he wants.  He loves her dearly, not that he’d tell her that, but he does wish very fervently that she hadn’t interrogated Beckett.  He wants Beckett to come to his, though he’ll settle for hers.

“And if my mother weren’t there?”  Beckett lets her other eyebrow join the first, equally coolly.

“Nice use of tenses there, Castle.  Anyone might think you were a writer.”  Castle acknowledges the hit with a nod.

“That’s not an answer, Beckett.  Even if it is grammatically very clever.  So _if_ my mother weren’t there, would you come to dinner?  _Un_ conditionally.”

Beckett reconsiders.   She can depress teen questioning and pretensions (not that Castle’s daughter has displayed that on any of their brief meetings, but she is a teen) with one look, or a pointed lift of one eyebrow at most.  Castle’s mother, however, is entirely un-depressable, and un-suppressable.

“ _If_ ” – the emphasis is very pronounced – “your mother were to be absent, then I might” – she smiles, very delicately feline, and touches her tongue to her lips – “be persuaded.”

“Persuaded?”  Castle’s suddenly predatory expression makes his views on what _persuasion_ might consist of very clear.  He drops into the syrup-of-sex deep tone that doesn’t ask permission before stroking her in intimate ways.  “I’m sure I can persuade you.”  He traces her jawline with one long finger, delineates her lips.  Heat rises between them; Beckett flicks the tip of her tongue over the pad of Castle’s finger, but he doesn’t take the bait.  His finger continues over her neck into the vee of her button down and draws a light circle over her pulse point, suddenly jumping.  “Come into my parlour.”  His finger drops a little further, to balance against the first closed button, where only a small flick would open it.  His eyes dare her to take the next step.  It’s the perfect feed line.

“Are you going to tie me up in silk and then eat me?” From the half-instant of stunned silence, he’d momentarily forgotten how well she can play the game of allusion and subtext and innuendo.  “I’m no fly.”  Castle’s stopped smiling: all that’s left in his face is hard male lust and a promise of midnight wickedness to come.  His voice is just as smooth as ever, but its undertone clenches her muscles and dampens her underwear.

“Any way you want it.”  His finger slips below the button for a fraction of a second, teases her with the possibilities of opening it.  Her lips part.  He removes the finger and stands up, smiles as if he’s inviting her to something as simple and innocent as a walk in the park.

“Are you persuaded yet?”  Beckett smiles seductively in return.

“If you fulfil the conditions.”

“I’m quite sure I can – _fulfil_ – your requests.”  He smiles darkly.  “I’ll go home and prepare.”  His gaze scorches over her, promising heat and wild nights.  “Text me when you’re ready.”  She’s ready now, she thinks.

Beckett returns to her paperwork, not without a moment’s difficulty in renewing her concentration.  The harsh chiaroscuro comparison between Sorenson’s behaviour and Castle’s has thrown into sharp relief her current confidence in her own ability to place trust where it’s merited.  That Castle, at least as forceful and take-charge as Sorenson, could and (more importantly) did step straight back and accept without question or a single iota of complaint that in case matters she should, and does, take full control, despite, she is sure, being in charge whenever he wants to be or needs to be, in any other aspect of his life, indicates that this time she’s got it right.  He’d put anything he might have wanted or needed behind him, because for him, as much as for the existing team, the case had come first. 

She ponders Castle for a moment.  You don’t get rich and stay rich if you’re not paying attention; and you don’t have an apparently normal, civilised child if you haven’t put a lot of effort into making it so.  Beckett is no stranger to the concept that you never admit how hard you work for your successes, but she thinks that Castle might be the epitome of that attitude, however carefully he hides it under the casual, cocky, playboy persona.  Though she does wonder just how much hard work and practice it took to be that good in bed.  Well.  She’s no blushing virgin either, even if it had been a long time out the game.  And his preferences and proclivities are so far matching up very nicely with hers.  She slips her handcuffs into her purse.  Just in case.

Paperwork is finished efficiently and perfectly, in pretty precisely the hour she’d predicted.  Beckett texts to say she’s leaving, receives the necessary confirmation of Martha’s non-attendance, and swings out of the precinct with the twin satisfactions of a case successfully completed and disposed of and the prospect of an... interesting... evening.

Castle had reached home, and through a combination of pressure and outright bribery, convinced his mother to go out for the evening, and preferably all night.  It had been disappointingly difficult, when normally it’s so hard to get her to stay in.  She had made it unpleasantly clear, at least from Castle’s jaundiced viewpoint (considering her record with regard to Beckett, he thinks that jaundice is amply justified) that she would dearly love to have what she openly described as a _nice girls’ chat_ with Detective Beckett, at which Castle’s own presence would be totally _de trop,_ darling.  Castle is not having that.  His mother has already wreaked sufficient havoc and mayhem in his plans for Beckett that allowing her another opportunity to interfere would be actively suicidal.  So he applies some focused effort and a few threats and removes Martha from the situation.

Alexis is considerably easier to deal with.  She’s already impressed, and a little intimidated, by Beckett, and it’s also a school night; so it’s pretty simple to persuade her not to cross-examine Beckett.  A brief, tactful reminder of his expectations as to manners with his guests, a short reference to her upcoming English assignment and subsequent test, and that’s all it takes to ensure an absence of intrusive questioning over dinner and shortly after that, he expects, an absence of Alexis.  Everything arranged precisely as Castle wants it, in fact. 

He contemplates, with considerable satisfaction, the way in which everything is working out very nicely indeed.  He’s always got what he wants, and even though this time it’s taken him a lot longer and a lot more effort than he’d ever anticipated, it’s been worth the wait, and indeed the effort.  He’s not been bored since the day he met her, and he hasn’t been blocked, either.  He’s found something that interests him, and which, far more importantly, achieves something useful and valuable – catching killers – and someone who fascinates him – Beckett – and two stories: one of which practically writes itself.  And one of which doesn’t, but he’s slowly discovering it.  He’d wanted Beckett, and he’s got her, and he’s keeping her, for as long as she’ll stay.  She’s accepted and admitted that he’s her partner, and last time they’d been together she’d come to him.  At least, she’d curled in of her own volition before he could tug her in, which, for Beckett, almost counts as a declaration of intent.  And now she’s coming to his territory, which she hasn’t done (at least not for this purpose) for almost four weeks, and she is damn well going to _stay_ here.  Even if he has to attach her to the bed to keep her here, _this_ time she is not going to sneak out while he’s sleeping.  She can at least tell him she’s going.  She’s his.  No ifs, no buts, no maybes.  _His_.  And that means that she stays with him.  As long as she wants to.

He’s entirely forgotten that he ever intended to place any time limit, or restrictions, on this affair.

On that satisfying note, he searches out certain items that might be useful, and appreciated, later; and, leaving them in a private place convenient to the bed, occupies himself in preparing dinner.  Just an ordinary dinner, as if she came to dinner every night.  But he checks that his story board is set to Nikki Heat.  Wouldn’t want to spoil that other surprise, in due time.

By the time Beckett texts, dinner is close to ready and wine is breathing on the counter.  Alexis comes bouncing down the stairs, full of enthusiasm for the meal ahead.

“Do you think Detective Beckett would tell me about” – don’t ask her about how she became a cop, Alexis – “the ME’s office?”  Okay, that was unexpected.

“I suppose so, pumpkin.  You could always ask her if she would introduce you to Dr Parrish, who’s the ME on most of Detective Beckett’s cases.  Why do you want to know?”  Alexis’s interests have ranged widely, but this one is new.

“It just seems interesting.  When I’m a senior I’ll get a chance to do an internship somewhere, and I want to start thinking about the options now.”  She smiles happily. 

“Okay, but if Detective Beckett doesn’t want to talk about something leave it.”  Alexis looks up at him, slightly surprised by the firmer tone.

“Sure, Dad.  No problem.”  And at that convenient moment, before Alexis can inquire into his reasoning, the door sounds and Beckett has arrived.

She’s obviously come straight from the precinct, same clothes, same purse, hair a little ruffled where she’s run her fingers through it.  On the other hand, one more button is open and the ruffled hair makes him think of all the ways he can, and will, ruffle her composure.  He escorts her in, hand skipping across her back before he’s in Alexis’s view – he _will not_ expose Alexis to anything less than permanent, he thinks, and doesn’t wonder why in that case Beckett is here for dinner with them at all – and notices the glint on metal mostly hidden in the depths of her purse.  Mmm.  Looks like they’re thinking in the same direction.  Everything they want, any way they want it.

“Hey, Castle.  Hi, Alexis.”  Alexis chirps happily in response.  Castle’s deep rumble implies rather more than a _pleased-to-see-you_ greeting.  Beckett grins impartially at both of them, and when Alexis turns away adds a provocative peep through swept lashes at Castle.  The flare in his eyes in response leaves her in no doubt where this evening is going to end. 

When they sit down to eat it’s Alexis who carries conversation.

“Detective Beckett, can I ask you about what an ME does?”

“Sure,” Beckett replies, a little nonplussed.  “Why d’you want to know?”

“It sounds interesting.  What do they do?”

“Well, first off they provide an on-scene determination of the cause of death – if they can – so we can get started on the investigation.  Then they take the victim back to the morgue and start a full investigation, tox screens – toxicology: drugs, poisons, alcohol, that sort of thing…”  Castle knows all this from Lanie already.  He half listens, letting Beckett’s voice wash into his brain, feeling the cadence and the tone that will inform Nikki Heat, let him keep hearing exactly how his fictional Detective will talk and think.   Alexis is punctuating the conversation with excited questions.  Strangely, Beckett’s quite happy with it.  None of the stress of the previous episode, no tension.  Maybe it’s because his mother is absent; maybe it’s because she’s not being asked about herself, but about a separate matter, that doesn’t touch her innate reserve and sensitivities. 

He’s suddenly amazingly proud of Alexis.  She’s the best, and most important thing he’s ever produced.  And right now, she’s playing it absolutely right with Beckett.  Not that Alexis is playing: no, she’s genuinely interested.  He supposes he’d prefer that she became an ME than a cop.  He can’t stand the thought that she might be injured or killed in the line of duty.  He realises that this must be how Beckett’s father feels all the time, and wonders, with more sympathy than previously, how hard it must have been for him to see his daughter willingly put herself in harm’s way, how difficult it must be for him not to obliterate that view with alcohol.  He returns his attention to dinner, just in time to hear Beckett close down the conversation.

“If you want, Alexis, I could ask Dr Parrish if she would talk to you.  You’ve extracted everything I know.  No matter how much more you interrogate me, I can’t tell you anything else.”  But she’s grinning as she says it, and it’s clear she’s in no way upset.

“Thank you!” squeaks Alexis.  Castle can see the beginnings of hero-worship on her face.  Deep inside, a small worm of uncertainty shrivels up and dies.  She should be friendly with his family. She should like them, as it’s obvious that they like her.  It’s important that she comes here.  Now, if only he could dial his mother back to the same level of enthusiasm as a reasonable person, rather than her theatrical over-exuberance, everything would be perfectly arranged.  No-one can fail to like Alexis, and Alexis clearly likes Beckett.  He doesn’t know quite what he’d do if she didn’t.  He’s never had that situation to contend with.  He’d have to give up on Beckett, though.  Strangely, that thought hurts more than it should, almost as much as when he thinks of Alexis growing up and leaving home.  Leaving him.

He mentally shakes his head.  There’s no comparison.  Alexis is his _daughter_.  Family.  However much he’s into Beckett, it’s not, it can’t be, the same.  Family is for ever.  The rest is transient, eventually.  But there’s a small sharp pain in his chest when he thinks of Beckett being transient.

Dinner finishes with, Castle informs Beckett, a fruit-and-cream confection which takes mere minutes to make but looks like it came from the chef at Eleven Madison Park.  Beckett’s automatic offer to help clear up is politely but firmly rejected; the remains of the wine migrate to the table by the couch and so, perforce, does Beckett, to be out of the way of a well-practised operation.  It’s… odd… to see Castle off-duty, as it were; not on display or indeed in public.  He’s quite different with his daughter, somehow totally relaxed in a way he hadn’t been when she returned the necklace.  She briefly flashes back to the quiet, serious, _real_ man she’s only clearly seen twice: once as he apologised when she raked him down after the nanny fiasco; once when he’d told her he’d stop shadowing her if she wanted.  This affectionate, fatherly, family man is surprisingly attractive.  _Don’t get in too deep, Kate_.  But she should know, if she let herself see what lurks deep down in a locked corner of her psyche, that it’s maybe already too late for that; has been too late since he did what Sorenson couldn’t and simply let her _do her job_ , did what was best for the case.  It takes a strong man to step back, when he wanted so badly to step forward.  She slips her shoes off and snuggles into the corner of Castle’s exceptionally comfortable couch; sips her wine slowly and, without even realising it, relaxes into the faint aroma of Castle’s aftershave that permeates the loft.


	54. Rhythm in your bedroom

Castle finishes the clearing up and affectionately dispatches Alexis to her English assignment and revision.  When he turns, wineglass in hand, to the couch, Beckett, and the remainder of the evening; he’s more than a little surprised, even after the easy conversation at dinner, to find her curled up and catlike, almost kittenish, a flirtatious quirk at the corner of her mouth that he could fall upon right now, did he not have different plans for progressing well past flirtation.  He’s never seen her this soft, at least before he’s turned her from fighting to purring.  He sits down close beside her, brings his arm around her and waits a beat to see what will happen, who’ll begin the music to their dance.

Beckett glances up with slumbrous, heavy eyes under half-lowered lashes, invitation and enticement both, and smiles seductively, stretching slightly in the feline way that rouses all his primitive instincts.  Castle runs a large finger very delicately over the smile, pushing slightly inward, drawing in a short breath when Beckett twines her tongue over the pad, and chases it with his own lazy, sleepy, sexy smile and bedroom eyes promising midnight delectation.  Tonight, he’s determined not to be drawn into the fiery explosion of the fast, hard sex that occurs almost every time they’re together: he’s going to show her what control really means, how good slow can be, how he can invoke, provoke, her reactions in a way that will pander to all her predilections, and his; a way that she’s guaranteed to enjoy.  He tightens his arm around her, till she’s firmly held against him, movement restricted, drops his other hand over hers on her leg and starts to draw slow circles with his thumb over the back of her hand.   He splays his fingers out and covers her hand entirely.  Warmth rises between their joined hands. His circles stay slow and easy and controlled.  Beckett’s breathing, though, begins to catch, very slightly, as the tips of his fingers press into the inseam of her pants.

She turns a fraction into Castle, uncurls her legs to slide them over his lap, brings her hand up to the vee of his button down and skims sharp nails lightly over the skin exposed there.  Castle smiles ferally, and moves their joined hands a little higher, never ceasing his erotic, hypnotic circles.  His long fingers stretch upward, inward; pressing gently, not –yet – stroking, encouraging her to open to his dangerously tantalising hand.  She peeps up through sweeping lashes, bites her lip, and gives him a sultry, _come-on_ look.  Time to take this elsewhere.  His living room is _not_ the place to continue further. 

He brings Beckett to standing, holding her waist; pauses as she slips her shoes back on; stands himself, pulling her against his hard bulk for a moment, showing her his intentions, discerning hers in her soft, breathy sigh and the curving of her body into him.  He walks her through to his study, snagging her purse on the way, (just in case) closes the door quietly behind them and then backs Beckett against it, slides his hand round the nape of her neck and angles her head so that he can kiss her deeply, plundering her mouth and swallowing the sexy little noises she’s already making as she opens her stance and he presses in.  She brings her hands up to his shoulders and holds him into her, surrendering to the force of his lips.  For a few moments, he simply stays there, still only kissing her, hard weight against her, fully dressed: nothing more, until she’s arching in and rubbing her breasts over his chest and rolling her hips into him as he pulls her closer till there’s no space between them and the noises are becoming less of a gasp and more like a moan.  He moves round and kisses her neck and flicks his tongue over her ear and nips at her lobe, and when he licks over the spot that makes her shudder that’s definitely a moan now.

Beckett slides her hands down over Castle’s firm ass and tries to pull him even closer into her, to make him grind into her, to touch her and stroke her and use his wickedly talented fingers and strength to bring her to hard fast release.  She’s already wet, ready, wanting more than dirty making out against a door; but he’s using all that weight to set the pace and keep her writhing.  She mewls: _more, Castle_ , and feels the shift of stubble against her throat as he smiles.

“More, Beckett?  That can be arranged.”  Somehow it sounds more like _you can be arranged_.  She knows what she wants.  What she likes.  What she needs.  And right now, being _arranged_ is very much on her mind.  He lifts his mouth away from her and stands tall, looming into her, cradling her tightly.

“Still _cinnamon_ , Beckett?”  She nods, entirely, arousingly aware of the implications of the question and her answer.  “Then let’s begin.”  And he walks her right into his bedroom and shuts that door too.  The definitive click of the door closing resonates right through her veins, a punctuation mark delineating the shift in her mind from three days ago to now: the difference in the depth of her trust.  He’s her partner, and she trusts him to have her back, on the job and here and now.

“I brought...” she starts.

“Shh.  We won’t need yours.  Just let go, Beckett.  I’ll lead, now.”  He kisses her, hard, possessive, unrelenting, till she’s moaning softly and curved in and he’s holding her close enough that she can feel every inch of him, hot, hard, heavy, and big enough to fill her completely, stretch her around him.  She’s soaked, now, only from the thought of him leading, that she can let him take her down into the deep dark depths of their joint desire and know that she’s safe there with him.  He steps back, runs hot eyes over her, and just his look makes her squirm as he sits on the edge of the bed and surveys her.  She licks her lips slowly, eyes him with the same hot dirty gaze he’s given her, and raises her hands to the top of her button down.

“No, Beckett.”  Castle smiles darkly at her.  “I’ll do that.  Come here.”  She takes the two steps to him without the slightest hesitation, to stand in front of him.  He doesn’t, at first, do anything more than open a single button, slowly, spread the vee of her shirt a little wider.  He places a quick, dirty, wet kiss at the point of the vee.  It’s intensely erotic without touching anything improper. The rise and fall of her chest intensifies a little.  He undoes a second button, spreads the cotton to expose a narrow rim of black lace, kisses again: a soft flick of tongue to each side.  Another button, revealing twilight purple satin below the lace, and another kiss.  By the time he’s reached the final button, slipped the shirt from her shoulders and placed a final kiss at her navel, swirling his tongue briefly into it, she’s whimpering softly and only his hands at her waist and hers on his broad shoulders are keeping her from swaying in.

“Pretty,” he says with satisfaction, and draws a line back up her torso from navel to cleavage.  He looks at her with wicked interest.  “So much sexy lingerie, Beckett.  Tell me, how did you feel when you wore what I gave you?”  A flush runs across her cheekbones, but she smiles equally wickedly, lets Castle see the answer in her face. 

“You’ll let me dress you again, won’t you?  How would you feel, knowing that under those formal button downs and dress pants I know exactly what you’re wearing; that I’m imagining you like this” – he undoes her pants and slides them off – “all silk and satin and lace in my bedroom?  You’d like it, wouldn’t you?  You’d be excited, wouldn’t you?  Just like you are now.”  He leans forward and slides the satin of her bra over the hard nipples, dampens the fabric and teases with smooth strokes of his tongue.  She pushes against his mouth.  “So eager, Beckett.  But sometimes, taking it slowly can be so much more… satisfying.”  He licks again, slowly.  Shocks sizzle down her body, and she gasps.  She steps nearer, out of the pools of material on the floor, ends up poised and beautiful at his knees.  Her eyes are dark, her lips wet, and the satin between her legs damp with arousal.

“You’ve come into my parlour.”

“Looks like it,” Beckett purrs.  “How are you intending to make me stay, though?”  Castle smiles slowly, and reaches round her to undo her bra and remove it.

“I thought you already knew that.”  And she remembers what she’d said and desire floods her.  He draws her down to straddle his lap and takes her mouth slowly, deeply.  She starts to undo his shirt, and he lets her, till they’re both naked from the waist up and he lies back, pulling her down on top of him and pushing his hips up into her, kissing her again as she moves against him faster, harder.  And then he rolls her over on to her back and pins her arms above her head and there’s the soft close of leather round her wrists and Castle sits back on his heels between her legs and regards her with complete satisfaction.

“Not quite silk, but I’m sure you’ll forgive that.”  He looks at her, heat and hunger and raw desire, and something else that she still doesn’t know how to interpret.  She wets her lips, flexes her body, and watches his eyes turn black.

“That wasn’t all you promised,” she murmurs – and he bends to her body, taking one and then the other hard peak into his mouth, licking and sucking, leaving them wet and taut in the cool air after the heat of his mouth until she’s tugging against the handcuffs and pleading _don’t stop, Castle_.  So of course he does.

“Slowly, Beckett.  My way.”  He looks at her as if she’s a deer and he’s the tiger stalking her.  “That’s what you want.”  He places one finger on her mouth, presses lightly and she opens for him to slide it in, sucks on it and twists her tongue around it and he groans because he _knows_ what that mouth can do but that can come later. He slides his finger out again and Beckett can’t help the disappointed noise she makes as it leaves.  But then he slithers it down across her body, around each areola and she arches into it for more, but it’s moving down across her stomach and skimming the edge of her panties and she _wants_ to push it to where his hand should already be and isn’t but her hands are bound and she’ll have to let him do it his way and _oh_ letting go like this feels so _right_.

When he slips his fingers across her hips, catching the dark lace at the top of her panties and pausing, tracing sigils on her skin and very slowly shifting lower, taking the lace with them, she squirms against him and demands more. 

“More?”  He leaves her panties, scrapes a finger over her thigh and she wriggles to try to bring his hand where it should be.  “Like that?”  Beckett lifts her head and glares – at least as much of a glare as she can manage through the haze of sheer arousal - down the bed at Castle, now sitting smirking at her.

“You know what I want,” she says, trying for her usual snap and failing to produce anything more than a husky, breathy plea.

“Yes, but do _you_ know what _I_ want?”  Castle smiles evilly.  Beckett produces an equally evil smile and flexes very slowly from her shoulders down, arching her hips towards him and ending slightly more open than when she began.  He doesn’t – can’t – take his eyes off her for an instant.

“You want me,” she says, full of satisfaction, and moves seductively against the piled pillows.

“Yes.”  His voice drops.  “I want you naked.”  He slides his hand over her thigh, stops just short of where she wants him.  His voice strokes soft fur over her nerves, exactly where his fingers aren’t.  The dark satin between her legs darkens further.  “I want you wet.”  She doesn’t think that’s precisely a problem.  His fingers move over the damp satin and she whimpers because it’s not _enough_.  He does it again, and she writhes against his hand.  “I want you open and begging and desperate for me.” He slips a hard finger under the fabric and barely into her and she moans as he withdraws it and peels her panties slowly down her legs.  His words are twining round her brain and sliding over her and just those wicked, wicked words are frighteningly effective.  He brings his fingers back and plays over her, never quite where she wants him for long enough.

“Touch me, Castle.  Stop _teasing_.”  He strokes over her again, still not hard enough or near enough or deep enough, and quirks an eyebrow.

“Trying to tell me what to do, Beckett?”  He rubs circles over her and the growl she meant to emit becomes a moan, repeated when he glides one hard thick finger over and into her and curls it to hit all her nerve endings.  She bucks into his grip.  Castle carries on until she’s reduced to formless noises and frantic movement, and then stops.  He’s hanging on to his own control by a fine, fine thread, painfully aroused and himself wholly desperate to be inside her.  The only thing that’s stopping him is that he knows that she likes to be kept close to the edge, he knows that she likes his mouth, and he knows that the longer he keeps them both close the better it will be.

“Please, Castle.  Don’t stop.”  He strips the remainder of his clothes efficiently and returns to his toying with her until she’s close to the edge and pleading again and he’s breathing harder and kissing her feverishly. He raises his head.

“Do you want me?”  Beckett writhes under his hand.

“Yes,” she forces out.  He leans down again and kisses her, searching her mouth, still playing between her legs so that she can’t think, can only respond.

“Me, Beckett.  Only me.  No-one else.”  He slides down her body, sharp little nips and wet soothing kisses, spreads her wide.  When he puts his mouth on her as he’s been wanting to since she entered his loft, she jerks against him and turns her face into the pillows to muffle her noises.  He adds fingers to tongue and slips in and out and over, holding her still so that he’s wholly in control of where he licks or sucks or bites or touches and _oh_ she’s wet and hot and begging and desperate and _so close_ and so is he but there’s more to do before he lets them come.

“I want you like this.  I want you to be _mine_.  All mine.  No-one else.  Just _us_.  Say you’re mine, Beckett.”  She makes a noise that has no words at all in it.  “Say it.”  He stops and rises from her, brings himself back up the bed, heavy and hard against her thigh.

“Yours, _please now_ ,” and he presses down and pushes all the way into her and _oh_ she’s so hot and tight around him and under him and he kisses her to keep them both quiet as he thrusts and she wraps her legs round his waist and he’s taken impossibly deeper as she moves in rhythm with him and he slides a hand through her and over her centre and she screams into his mouth as he groans into hers and the world stops moving for them.

He undoes her and she curls into his arms as quickly as he pulls her in: it seems they have the same thought: closeness. 

Beckett, exhausted by the case, the confrontations with Sorenson, and spectacularly good sex in just the way she likes it best, cuddles in, unusually willing to be petted and held, happy to surrender all control to Castle, and closes her eyes peacefully.  She hasn’t missed Castle’s addition of _Just us_ to the mix, but she’s not into sharing and not into threesomes, so that’s hardly an issue.  And since it’s become perfectly, beautifully clear during this last case that possessiveness in bed (which she likes) does not equal possessiveness at work (which she certainly wouldn’t like) then she is also perfectly, beautifully content that her blazing affair with Castle is proceeding along precisely the lines that she wants.  In a moment or two, she’ll have to clean up and leave.  Just in a moment or two.  Not quite yet.  In a while.  She snuggles closer and simply lets her mind drift, relaxed in a way she rarely experiences. 

The last thing she remembers thinking is _Partners_.

Castle is also perfectly, beautifully content that his relationship with Beckett is proceeding along precisely the lines that he wants.  He’s seen off Sorenson, Beckett’s accepted that they’re _partners_ , and here she is, curled into his arms just as if she belonged there.  Well.  She does belong there.  He lays a possessive arm across her, and considers the position.  He’s made himself – is making himself - into a better man under the relentless example of Beckett and her team: he’s shown _himself_ that he can step back from the immediate desire to have exactly what he wants in pursuit of a greater goal – in this case, solving the crime.  He realises, slightly surprised, that somewhere along the way, during these last weeks, _solving the crime_ has become as important to him as it is to – well, to Ryan and Esposito.  He doesn’t think, short of a total personality transplant, that it can ever be as important to him as it is to Beckett.  He has, after all, Alexis and his mother to look after.  If one of them were hurt or killed, though… hmm.  He might take a different path, if that were true.  Especially if it were Alexis.

He looks at Beckett, tucked against him, accepting his presence, protection and possession: accepting that they’re partners.  So far, so good.  Sure, she doesn’t call it a relationship, but a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, and the facts don’t lie.  The world has bent to his will, however he’s got here, and along the way he’s recovered the man he always wanted to be: the one who’s never broken his word, who’s kept his promises, and who behaves outside his front door in the way he behaves within it.  Only that one thing left to do, to lay at her feet: the information she needs to decide what she wants to do with her defining case.  When that’s done, there will be nothing in their way, for as long as they want.

He gently pulls the comforter over Beckett, takes a brief break to clean himself up, noticing that she doesn’t stir, and returns to nestle her close again.

The last thing he remembers thinking is _Mine._


	55. Wake me up

Beckett wakes in the half-light of nearly dawn, and abruptly realises several things.  Firstly, she’s still at Castle’s loft, in Castle’s bed, and tucked in against him like she’s his favourite teddy bear.  Again.  Secondly, that feels very nice.  Thirdly, and not nearly as nice, she needs to get home, shower, change, and be on time for shift at 8.30 a.m.  Which will still be later than she normally hits the precinct, but if she leaves right now will be eminently achievable.  Fourthly, she needs to get out of here before any of Castle’s overly-inquisitive family – by which, actually, she mainly means his mother – wake up, find her still there, and start asking questions that she really, really does not want to answer.

And fifthly, she doesn’t want to go.

She’s warm, and comfortable (though she really wouldn’t mind a shower: she must have been more wrung out by the case than she’d thought; it’s not her normal practice not to wash before sleeping), and surrounded by Castle’s already-familiar scent and presence and the reassuring bulk of his big, well-muscled body.  Still, duty calls.  The dead are always there, making demands of her.

She wriggles out of Castle’s embrace far enough to be able to shake his shoulder till he prises open hazy, sleepy eyes, even half-awake sexy enough for her to momentarily think about simply falling into him and starting again – and then reject it.   She has to get to work. 

“I need to go,” she murmurs.  “Work.”  Deep blue eyes open wider.

“Body?  Wait for me.”

“No body.  Yet.  I’ll call if there’s a body.  Paperwork.”  Castle’s eyes open all the way, disappointment (and something else behind it, that might be satisfaction but isn’t quite) written on his face.

“No body?  D’you have to go?”

“Yes.  Work.  Shift starts at 8.30.  I need a shower” –

“I got a shower.”  He looks predatory.  Sleep is rapidly falling away from him.

\- “and fresh clothes, and I don’t want to disturb anyone.”  Castle sits up, still holding her lightly. With some considerable difficulty, he reminds himself that he’s still proving that he can manage _not_ to take care of her and not to interfere with her job.  More than following her around and helping interferes, anyway.  So though he’d far rather pull her back down, kiss her and stroke her till she moans, pass on to another round of spectacular sex, and then keep her next to him for some time – he shouldn’t.  He’s going to be a better man than that. Really.

“Okay.  You gotta go.  See you later.”   He finds himself a robe and watches Beckett dress, not troubling to conceal his admiration of the view as she does, and then sees her to the door.  But before he opens it for her, and lets her go, he pulls her in and kisses her hard and possessively, glorying in her instant, fervent response.

It’s only when she’s gone, and he’s brewing his coffee, that he thinks about what he’s done.  Oh.  So much for no sleepovers, for not bringing his affairs home, for keeping Alexis away from his life outside their door.  It seems that he’s more serious about this relationship with Beckett even than he’d realised. It’s good, though.  It’s all good. 

He thinks with some satisfaction that he’s managed to bring Beckett and Alexis to a state of comfortably pleasant co-existence – in that Alexis won’t ask questions and Beckett won’t behave as if Alexis is the Spanish Inquisition – so now all he has to do is manage his mother.  And then he realises that Beckett woke him up just to tell him she was leaving and she didn’t just run away without a word or simply leave a note.  It’s a breakthrough, he thinks.  Even if it has woken him up horrendously early.  He inhales his coffee and goes to pursue Nikki and Rook for a while, until it’s actually breakfast time.

* * *

 

Nothing happens for the next few days, in the precinct. 

Castle has turned up in the precinct each morning bearing coffee and a bear claw, asked a few questions about how Beckett made it through the Academy and then disappeared to write.  Occasionally, he turns up again later, checking some point with any of the team, and leaves again.  Beckett snarks and snaps at him just the way she always does, and he ensures that he gives her the same combination of innuendo, heated looks and way-out theories and produces the same level of general irritation that he always has.  The boys regard them both with considerable suspicion but in view of the lack of time for which Castle is present in the precinct are unable to fasten on any evidence to support their sweepstake.

Instead, paperwork is cleared, cold cases reviewed, filing finished, and all the normal attributes of boredom start to appear: jokes, pranks and even paper aeroplanes.  At least until one lands in Montgomery’s office, when paper aeroplanes rapidly become unpopular.  Even Beckett goes home at relatively reasonable hours.  For her, anyway.  She’s still staying well beyond the end of shift.  Then again, for the first time in years she has something of a reason to go home.  One way or another, Castle is turning up at hers pretty much every evening.  They seem, without ever having discussed it out loud, to have agreed that going to his would raise too many questions that neither of them want to answer. 

And, of course, her apartment is entirely private.  Which is also just as well.  Neither of them are precisely quiet.  Since the kidnap case, they’ve taken several rapid steps down into the dark waters of their pooled desire.  She lets him tell her which set from her extensive underwear collection he’d like to see her in: and when he brings her coffee she knows he’s imagining – or, as often, remembering from when she dresses – how she looks in it, open and waiting for him.  Simply the look he gives her, then, leaves her hot and damp; and all too often the heated texts, born of knowledge and experience, he sends her at occasional intervals through the day leave her edgy and aroused till he arrives.  Not that she’s shy of returning the favour.  They never touch, in the precinct.  It would be far too dangerous.  At Beckett’s apartment, though, at the end of the day, matters are, as a result, as explosive as the very first time.

Every night, she surrenders to another level of his control; lets him take her to the places that she’d dreamed about, slipping deeper into the blazing heat and dangerous thrill of giving in, giving up in ways she’d not dared to return to since she used to be that bad, bad girl, running with the bad, bad boys.  Every day, he validates her growing trust by never, ever taking advantage of it anywhere outside her front door.  He takes her down into the darkness, and brings her back unscathed.

Castle can’t get enough of Beckett.  Proximity hasn’t abated or softened his obsession with her one whit, and though he leaves, each time, to be home for his daughter, he knows that the next night he’ll be back.  He watches her trust in him deepen, so much faster than he’d ever thought it could, and tells himself to wait, not to push, to delay until Clark Murray brings him answers.  He thinks that Beckett’s falling deeper and deeper into this _relationship_ , and that sometime soon she’ll be able to admit it.  About the same time as _she_ tells him her name.  Every time he asks her, she brushes it off with a quick quip and a laugh, as if it’s a great joke that she won’t tell him.  No matter how he tries to persuade her – and he’s tried every way possible, in every position – she smiles like a satisfied cat and doesn’t tell.

Gradually, Beckett’s feeling that there’s more to this.  Sure, the sex is scorchingly hot, but even out of bed, she’s having – well, fun.  They talk about nothing, and anything: she complains about the paperwork, or Ryan’s dress sense; he mutters about the demands of Black Pawn, though never of a lack of inspiration.  (He’s found more inspiration than he knows what to do with, and his problem is writing too much, too meaningfully, rather than too little.)  They’re beginning to become _friends_ , she realises, and now that doesn’t frighten her the way it might have even three weeks ago.  She isn’t dreaming of the dead, she doesn’t think she’s risking burnout the way she thought she might be less than two months ago; and her edgy dreams have been replaced by muscular, hard reality.  But she still doesn’t talk about her past, at all, and though she occasionally spots Castle’s curiosity burning in his face, he doesn’t ask.

Soon, she thinks.  If this carries on as it’s going, maybe sometime soon she can take that final step and tell him her story.  He’s not trying to force her to tell him, he’s not treating her as anything other than a cop outside the apartment.  (Inside, when he’s bringing her to screaming satisfaction, is frequently a very different matter.)  He knows the very bare bones she’s revealed, and, she thinks, hasn’t treated her any differently because of it.  Soon, when she’s sure, when she’s ready.  Once she’s taken that step, she might take the next, allow herself to believe in something that’s not just the blazing affair she’d intended it to be.

But not quite yet.

* * *

 

Castle has left a couple of messages for Clark Murray, and finally, on Tuesday morning, he calls round.  Much to Castle’s disappointment, there are no answers as yet.  Clark’s just been too busy with urgent work.  However, he promises, his appointments calendar has cleared and he’s sure he’ll be able to devote some time to the photographs and file over the next couple of days. 

Still, Dr Murray is bemused by Rick’s insistence that he get on with it.

“Rick, why are you so bothered by this?  It’s a ten-year old case, for heaven’s sake.  What does it matter if I get to it tomorrow or next week?  There’s no time limit.”  His friend looks fractionally uncomfortable.  “What’s it got to do with you anyway, Rick?”  Dr Murray abruptly remembers that Rick hadn’t answered that question the first time round.  Or the second, when he’d handed over the file.  He’d originally said he would, but then somehow the moment never arrived.

“You know I said I was following around a detective for the new book?  Well, it’s a cold case of hers.”  That’s interesting, Dr Murray notes, as a frisson of worry climbs up his spine.  Rick is getting involved in a cold case?  “It was her mother.”  The bad feeling takes up full residence.  Rick has clearly – it’s absolutely obvious from his whole demeanour in those few sentences – turned his entire focus and intelligence on one thing.  Dr Murray had thought, previously, that if he ever did that it would be effective.  He hadn’t thought quite how effective – and downright terrifying – it might be.  It’s also clear that this has nothing to do with the book and everything to do with the detective.  The immense potential for absolute disaster suddenly looms, infinitely appalling, in front of him.  Dr Murray is immediately convinced that Rick has wholly ignored any constraints of sense or wisdom in his pursuit of the detective.

“Rick,” he starts.

“Mmm?”  Rick doesn’t seem to be paying complete attention.  Dr Murray recognises the small signs of distraction.

“Rick!”  Rick wakes up.  “Are you sure this is a good idea?  After all, a cop’s mom…  surely they took a good hard look at it then?”

“She wasn’t a cop then.  Clark, are you gonna do this for me or not?”  Dr Murray looks at Rick, who’s re-acquired all the focus he’d lost a moment ago, and draws his own conclusions from the authoritative tone. 

“Yes.  But on your own head be it, Rick, if it doesn’t work out.”

“It’ll be fine.  You’ll see.  If there’s nothing to find, there’ll be nothing to say.  But if there is something” – and Dr Murray sees the hope shining in Rick’s face, realising with a shuddering sense of doom that he hasn’t seen that bright expression since before Rick’s first marriage – “then I can pass it on and she’ll be able to solve the case and get closure.”  Dr Murray knows this is a bad idea.  A really, really bad idea.  But he can’t tell Rick anything, because Rick won’t listen.  There is absolutely no chance at all that Rick would listen.  Last time it had only involved cleaning up a microwave.  This time, he thinks that it won’t be anything like as simple.

Castle walks Dr Murray politely to the door and returns to his study to contemplate happily Beckett’s anticipated delight when he brings her some new information on her mother, and all the ways they might make good use of that delight.  He contemplates even more happily that this way he’ll have shown her several things: that he can investigate, too, not just come up with theories; that he’s not taking care of her, because he’s not going to do anything with the information, just pass it on to her for her to deal with; that he shares her obsession with catching killers, old and new; and that together they’re a formidable force.  Deep in the back of his mind, a little rill of satisfaction that he doesn’t hear and wouldn’t pay attention to even if he did whispers _then she’ll stay forever._

He’s got everything he wants.  A book that will sell by the million; a purpose to his life that means more than just riches and PR; real friends, who don’t care about the celebrity shell or anything associated with it; and most importantly Beckett, for as long as they both want it.  He’ll never be a failure ever again, with those items washing away the well-buried insecurities of his early life.

He becomes aware that his mother has appeared, and perceives further that she’s looking mildly displeased.  When she starts to speak, it’s clear that she’s bent on another round of interference – though she’d undoubtedly call it _help_.  When she starts questioning his actions, though, he’s not impressed.

“Well, you ever stop to think you’re invading her privacy?”  He’s not.  If he were to go further and solve it, that might be invading her privacy.  But he’s finding some information to give her so she can solve it.  There’s a big difference.  He’s perfectly satisfied that he’s not overstepping Beckett’s boundaries.  Even if he did – but he’s not, he really is not – she’d be so happy to have more information that she’ll forgive him.  Even if she’s not happy, (but he really does not think that that could ever be the case: solving murder is her obsession and her life and anything that helps that makes her happy) he’ll explain his reasoning and how he’s not breached her instructions and though she might be angry for a moment it’ll be okay again pretty quickly.  Then there’ll be nothing in his – their - way.

“I'm not poking through her underwear drawer.”  No.  And that wouldn’t be an invasion of her privacy since she invites him to do so every time he’s there, and then wears what he tells her to.  “I'm investigating her mother's murder,” he says with a snap of irritation.  His mother doesn’t seem convinced. 

“You are digging up her past, darling, without her permission. Now you either tell her or leave it alone.”  What is he, five?  And anyway, he does have permission.  They’d discussed this.  He carefully forgets that he’d used some particularly evasive language so that he could carry on with this line of investigation without lying to Beckett or breaking his word to her.  And he isn’t doing either: he _isn’t_ , he _isn’t_.  But his mother’s look and words leave a squirming unpleasantness behind them.  Fortunately, at that point his phone rings, and there’s a body.

Beckett’s phone rings with the news of a new body midway through the day.  Everyone’s only too happy to have something new to do: cold cases get… well, cold… after a while.  And it gives the team a good excuse to explain to Castle why not one of them is going to run his daughter’s prom date through the system, no matter how many times he asks them to.  Though if Ryan and Esposito keep ragging him about what 15-year old boys get up to he looks as if he might learn how to do it himself.  Surely he’d been 15 once?  Though come to think of it, that might be part of the problem.

This corpse is another nasty, nasty murder, though.  Plastic over his head, broken fingers – even Lanie looks at it with disgust and tells them the victim – a cosmetic surgeon?  Takes all sorts – was most likely tortured, and he’s been dead about a week already.

They spend the rest of the day trying to run down next of kin, handing the car over to CSU, waiting for all of Lanie’s tests to get results.  By the time they find out there’s a fiancée it’s late in the day, and they’ll bring her round tomorrow.  Being told about the death is bad enough, no point giving her a miserable night seeing it in her mind as well.

Castle arrives at Beckett’s somewhere close to eleven, when she’s finally texted him to say she’s on her way home.  He knows she’ll be strung out on the adrenaline wire of a new case, her mind racing, analysing and searching and completely unable to switch off – until he switches her off: dials her back from the full-on, full-force headlong rush into her obsessive desire to solve her case faster, quicker, _better_.  She has to stop, has to put it aside for even a couple of hours; just long enough to recharge.  However much she fights it, fights him, she knows and he knows that this is what she needs.  She probably needs food as well, but that’s up to her.  (But soon.  Soon she’ll let him take care of her properly, let him ensure she eats regularly, sleeps at night, has a life.  Soon it won’t just be spectacular sex and soft aftermath of holding her to him for as long as he lets himself stay; he won’t just provide the dominant dynamic of their mutual desire.  Soon, it’ll be, he’ll be, _they’ll_ be, more.)

So when he’s shut her door behind him and looked at her wired-up, focused gaze and the growing circles under her eyes he gathers her in and holds her tightly and doesn’t ask if she’s eaten or rested or even had a drink, because he knows already that none of these have occurred, nor will they.  Instead he imprisons her hands behind her back and her body firmly against his and feels the kick of her desire in the pulse at her neck and the turn of her wrists as she tugs against his hand.

“Stop fighting,” he says softly, the way he’s done before when the case is too much: not quite an order, nor yet quite a request. “Let it be, for now.  Let it go.  Take it back tomorrow.”   He bends to her lips and deliberately, forcefully, begins to take the case from her.  And faster than the last time, which had been faster than the time before that, she gives it up.  He pulls her tighter; lets go of her hands so that he has freedom to press her into him and allow her to feel all the fettered power in his body.  Suddenly, astonishingly, she simply gives it all up to him and relaxes against him, leaning in, not fighting or struggling or making demands or trying to take, or keep, control until he takes that from her too; simply resting against him in a way that begs for petting and comfort, not hard, rough sex or sensual domination. 

She wants – how strange, given how hard-wired she was a moment ago - soothed, he realises, and though for all this time their love life (he doesn’t even notice how the words _love life_ have replaced _sex life_ in his mind) has been defined by their joint desire for blazing, explosive, intercourse where she demands that he force her to submit, perhaps followed by a softer, but still definite, control, suddenly she’s unconsciously asking for something different.  _Any way she likes it_ , he thinks, and strokes her hair, her back; gentling her as she stands against him, turning her face up and kissing her softly, entreating entrance rather than requiring it.  Soft lips beget soft hands, the curve of her body not straining into him but yielding, moulding against him rather than pressing in.

He brings them to the couch, sits, coaxes her to land in his lap, cossets her close and continues to kiss her softly, enticing her to snuggle closer, to curl into his wide chest and rest in the crook of his arm: not, as so often she’s wanted, a cage to confine her but simply a support to provide her with comfort.  And she’s responsive in a different way, her hands gliding up to clasp his face, pliant lips, frame malleable in his strong grasp; soft in a way he’s only previously seen when she’s almost asleep.  Tired as she must be, though, Beckett’s not asleep, though her eyes are hazy, missing their usual sharp intelligence and hard focus.  It takes him a moment to realise what he’s seeing: a gaze that he recognises but never expected to see from Beckett.

It’s trust.


	56. Trust in one another

It’s so comfortable, tucked into Castle’s arms and lap; cossetted in a way she hasn’t been in too many years.  Beckett nuzzles into his neck, head on his shoulder, hand on his waist.  For a moment she just stays motionless, contented.  He’s so much bigger and broader than she, that it’s almost like being a much younger Kate on her father’s knee: safe, protected, loved.  She shivers, briefly, and Castle’s arm tightens.  It’s not the same.  It won’t ever be the same.  Too much has changed in her life for it ever to be the same.  She doesn’t need to be kept safe, or protected: she can do both for herself.  She doesn’t expect, or, she believes, want, to be loved: it’s a complication she can’t deal with.  She doesn’t, she believes, need to be loved.

But here and now, under her head, is the next best thing.  Trust.

She turns her face up, reaches for Castle and strokes his cheek, feeling the roughness of stubble under her fingertips, runs her hand around to the back of his neck and gently encourages him to bend the short distance to her mouth.  His kiss is soft and sweet and all his passion is leashed and subsumed in tenderness.  Both arms encircle her, not the frantic heat and pressure of all previous times, but solid strength.  She kisses him equally delicately, slow and smooth and gentle.  It could be the first time she’d ever been kissed, the first time she’d ever kissed a boy.

The exchange of soft kisses carries on for some time, neither taking any steps to move from gentle making out to anything more.  Castle doesn’t press the point, content to let Beckett take what she needs in the way that she needs it.  Tonight, she needs something different from the usual games and preferences.  _Anything she wants, any way she wants it_.  And he has to confess to himself that no matter how good – amazing – their normal practices are: how hot she is when she’s cuffed and naked and screaming his name, or wearing the underwear he selects for her because he tells her to, or simply when she’s under him and around him and _with_ him – he likes this soft, undemanding kissing too.  It’s odd.  He’s not, for a long time, simply stopped at enjoying the preliminaries, rather than ensuring that he and his partner of the day proceeded to the main event.  Not since college, and the last woman who’d ever walked away from him.  In this, as in so many ways, his topsy-turvy relationship with Beckett is bringing him back to the man he wanted to be: the one who gives, and doesn’t simply take, however much his partner might want and enjoy it.

Eventually, Beckett detaches herself from Castle’s mouth and glances at her watch.  It’s nearly midnight, and she needs to sleep. She’s not strung out any more, not still over-revved and desperate to find the next clue, or lead, or suspect or witness.  She can – she will – pick it all up when she wakes, rested and refreshed.  Who knew that this peaceful gentleness could be as fulfilling, as effective in bringing her down from the adrenaline peak that keeps her running through every case, as her previous need for the hot erotic dreams, or the scorching reality currently holding her?  Still, there’s something more she would like, something more that will ensure she sleeps well.

“Castle, will you stay?” 

She doesn’t even think that she’s asking for him to take care of her, that this is a step change in how she thinks of him.  Since Sorenson, since she’s seen the differences between Castle and that other man, since he’s become her partner, since she’s believed she can trust him, because he’s proved that he’s not trying to interfere or let their private proclivities affect their public lives – she can ask for what she needs and not feel that merely asking will lead to her being thought weak or incapable. 

“Sure.”  Just as if she asks him every time, as casually as she’d ask him to look at the murder board, she’s asked him to stay.  She’s _asking_ for something.  Asking _him_ for something.  Asking for something more than blazing sex and exhausted sleep together afterwards because neither can move.  “I’ll need to go early, though, to be home for breakfast.”  Just as if it’s casual. 

Snuggled into Castle in bed, soft and sleepy, Beckett enjoys the feeling and doesn’t need to ask herself why she feels safe.  She doesn't need to be protected, but it’s good to know that she can trust Castle to have her back.  She wraps more closely into his arms and stays there.  As she drops into sleep she muses vaguely that he fits around her very neatly, both in mind and body.

Castle enjoys the sensation of Beckett cuddled into him and ponders the unusual position of being in bed with her without having spent the preceding period in searing, hard-edged sex that leaves them clinging to each other to climb out of the pool together.  He likes that, likes being in control, likes being on top; always has been comfortable in the dangerous depths and the darkness.   And so he finds it strange that he is _also_ , suddenly, very happy to be in this softer, gentler place; possessive in a different way – no, not possessive.  Protective, perhaps, not that Beckett is in any need of protection outside her own front door.  But inside it – well, he thinks that’s a very different place.  She doesn’t need to be protected from anything external, (though he’d be able to do so, in the extremely unlikely event that it were ever to be required) but from herself?  _She’s at the job all the time.  Barely goes home.  We all know she’s heading for burnout_.  Esposito’s words ring as clearly in his mind now as when they’d first been spoken.   Except now, he thinks, she isn’t.  She’s still at the job most of the time, but she’s lost a lot of the anger and fury that had burnt when he’d met her.  She’s a little more relaxed, she’s having a little more fun.  Same edge, same driving need to solve the case, but now she’s started to put it down for an hour or two. 

Somewhere, in all the complexity that makes up Beckett, he’s fitted himself into her life as neatly as a key in a lock.  He’s standing between her and burnout, the asbestos blanket dousing the fires of her obsession for long enough to stop her flaming out.  She’s let herself give in to him, not just in bed, but out of it.  He doesn’t think she knows it, (by the time she realises, she won’t want to change it) and he’s not stupid enough to tell her that it’s anything but the way he’d thought this would all play out, back in the beginning when all he’d wanted was her body for a night and her sexual surrender; but it’s better by far than that.  He’d never thought that he’d find this partnership of equals.  And if he’s the key to her lock: well, he thinks that she’s also the key to his.  And so very, very soon, he’ll hand her the key to open the last of her padlocks and there will be no more barriers.

He’ll have – they’ll have – everything he wanted but this time it will be everything she wants too.

* * *

 

The fiancée is, predictably, devastated, standing in the morgue looking at the dead man, and then quietly crying all the way to the precinct.  They’d have been married, in less than a month.  But she has no idea why he was so far up-town, when he should have been in Great Neck tasting wedding cakes and thinking about the future.  Interrogation, very carefully in deference to her upset state, doesn’t get them anywhere, and Beckett lets the woman go without any reluctance.  Nothing she’s said trips any of Beckett’s well-sensitised instincts for lies and evasions.  When her alibi checks out, there’s no more reason to talk to her now.  While Esposito and Ryan are dispatched to the Midtown garage where the dead man kept his car in hopes of finding security footage or any other evidence; Beckett and Castle take a trip to his office.

“Hey, can I ask you something?”  Castle’s decided that regardless of her comments about not talking to her about her history, matters have moved on enough in the last week or two that he can make an attempt at changing that.  He’s a little tired of not knowing her past.

“Since when do you ask permission to ask questions?”  Beckett is suspicious, and snarky, but not yet annoyed.

“It's about your mother's case.”  She comes to a juddering halt and looks straight at him, instant anger already building.  This is simply not an area she’s ready for, yet.  She needs more time.  However much she’s come to trust him, this is too soon, too new, for her wholly to believe that he won’t use it against her.  She can’t do this yet.  He mustn’t go and look at it.

“Have you ever thought about... reopening it?”  _Shit_.  He can’t do this.  He mustn’t do this.  _She_ can’t do this.  Time to shut this down, stat.  It’s all too soon.  Her mouth opens without her permission, before she’s thought through what she’s saying, or the tone in which she says it.

“What are you doing?”  Her tone is sharp, but there’s an undertone of worry and – upset?  No.  Not upset.  Panic.  Uh-oh.  Castle thinks he’d better leave out what he’s been doing.  No point opening wounds if Clark hasn’t found anything.  He’ll simply never mention it again.  He had better be extremely careful here.  Clearly Beckett’s sensitivity to talking about her past is not wholly cured, despite the last two weeks. 

“Nothing. I just thought if we worked together” -

“No.”  What?  No?  In that guillotine tone?  Her obsession, her _life_ , is catching killers.  How can she not want to catch this one?  Time to trail temptation before her, to sweeten the pot.

“I have resources.”  It’s not changing her hard expression at all.  She’s freezing up, under his gaze.  He won’t let her shut him out.  He’s never let her shut him out.  Even steering clear of her past has simply been a delay, not a Bluebeard’s chamber that he’ll never enter.  But not here, not now.  He looks into her face, and sees the potential for disaster looking back.  Time to back off, to wait, to leave the hunt for information for another day.  Time to fall back and retrench.

“Castle, you touch my mom's case, and you and I are done. Do you understand?”  She has to stop him.  Thin, cold pain is splitting her heart.  Old pain, never wholly healed.  She can’t do this.  She can’t fall back into the pit she spent so much time crawling out from.  If she falls again, nothing and no-one will be able to save her from herself.  No belaying will keep her from cutting her own rope and diving headfirst, headlong, down the cliff face into the crevasse.

That sounds uncompromisingly definite.  It’s too late now to stop Clark, because he’s been and gone and done it: initiated the actions.  But he’s sure he can talk Beckett round, in due course.  She’s been in his bed and his arms and she’s consented to be taken to anywhere, any way, he’s wanted, she’s made them partners, and she’s _his._   Nothing is going to change that she’s his.  Nothing.  Still, he’d better be honest with her very soon.  He’ll just see if Clark’s found anything first.  Because if he hasn’t, there will be nothing to need to be honest about.

“Okay.”  He won’t touch it again until she asks him to, but he had started on this path long before she’d forbidden him to follow it now.  She’ll understand, when he explains.  And still, she hasn’t silenced him yet, so he’ll try the key question hammering at his mind.

“Why don't you want to investigate it?”

She stops walking and faces him again, hard eyes and pinched mouth, a learned response to insurmountable pain.  He’s seen it before, though not on Beckett.  Long before he’d ever met her, before he’d been a success, before he’d won everything he wanted, he’d seen that face on a hundred struggling actresses.  He’d seen it, at home.  He never wants to see it on anyone again: he’ll do almost anything to take it away from Beckett.  He’ll keep pushing Clark, because he has to take that expression away.

“Same reason a recovering alcoholic doesn't drink.”  That’s hardly an accidental comparison, he thinks.  Not with the example of her father in front of her.  “You don't think I haven't been down there?  You don't think I haven't memorized every line in that file?  My first three years on the force, every off-duty moment was spent looking for something someone missed.  It took me a year of therapy to realize if I didn't let it go, it was gonna destroy me.  And so I let it go.” 

It’s more than she’s ever said about her past, and it’s horrifying how deeply she had lost herself in it.  _Addicted_ , he thinks.  And yet, she hasn’t let it go at all, just re-channelled it into finding justice for other people’s dead instead of her own: become addicted to the dead in general, not one death in particular.  It’s destroyed her, all the same, despite all her therapy and all her belief she’s past it.  Like hell she is.  He has to say something.  Something neutral, something that isn’t shaking her till she sees the truth, that she’s still fighting that same war.  Ripping her scars open won’t help now.

“Sorry. I didn't know.” 

But now, now he’s here, to stop it destroying her.  To stop her fighting these battles alone, or to turn her to fighting him, till he stops that too.  Together, they can fight this war, and win it, and keep – make - her whole.  But she doesn’t look like she believes that he can help at all.  The steel within him rises up.  He’ll give her what he finds, and carry her through the decisions she’ll make.  She’ll see that together they can solve this crime, too, as they have the ones before, and after she’s – they’ve – solved it, she’ll heal.

“Yeah, well, now you do.”  _So keep away from it, Castle.  I’m not ready for this._   She needs just a little more time, a little more trust.  Now he knows how strongly she feels, he’ll leave it be.  He’s respected her boundaries, since she’d set them and he’d agreed.  She just needs a little more time.

The surgeon’s office, once they’ve got past a patient who’s been rather over-inflated around the chest, yields a suspect: someone who appears to be addicted to surgery and who rivals the Bride of Frankenstein for stitch marks.  It takes a while to extricate the file from the claws of the surgery and medical confidentiality, but the next morning it’s worth it to see Montgomery choke on his coffee as he looks at the photos.   Unfortunately, when they get their suspect in, still spitting feathers that the good doctor wouldn’t operate on her again, (Beckett wonders how he’d manage to get the needle through the revoltingly taut skin to stitch it, and wonders further whether Frankenstein’s wife here wouldn’t have done better with Botox) she produces an unbreakable alibi.  She’d been in hospital.  More surgery. She explains the details – after Castle’s left the room and it’s just girls together.  This time it was a different set of lips to those on her face.  Beckett crosses her legs in wincing horror.  Suddenly she understands why men cross their legs at a threat to their genitals.  Ugghhh.  Thankfully, Castle remains missing.  Beckett shudders to think what theories he might spin from this piece of evidence.  Fortunately he’ll never know about it.  She’s only just recovered her composure when she has to report to Montgomery, who’s equally revolted.  They pass on from that subject exceedingly quickly, by unspoken mutual and violently embarrassed agreement.   

Still rocked by their conversation, Beckett doesn’t call Castle that evening, as she hadn’t the previous evening, and accidentally on purpose manages to miss his call, again.  She needs time to pull herself together.  Time apart.  Time to decide what to do.  Just – time.

By the time she returns his call, it’s too late, she says, for him to come round.  She’s too tired, she says, she needs some room.  She’ll call him tomorrow, she says.  He believes it’s true, but it’s anything but the whole truth, but, again, as he had thought the day before, when she hadn’t even mentioned calling him, he won’t ruin this by _taking care_ of her, nor by ignoring a clear hint.  If she needs space, he can give it to her.  He doesn’t need to cling to her.  She doesn’t need to cling to him.  But he won’t let her shut him out, either.  He tells her to call him if she needs him, and writes his way through the remainder of both days, trying to bury the uneasy squirming in his gut, the feeling that she’s slipping out of his grasp.  By the evening of the second day, he’s had enough of both the unease and the absence of Beckett.

Beckett’s team, minus Castle, spends the next day running down evidence and slogging through records, security footage, and files and files of medical procedures.  They’ll do that again tomorrow.  The car yields nothing, when CSU are finally done with it.  And at ten p.m., Beckett’s sitting on the desk in the Twelfth Precinct, alone, and kicking her feet tempestuously at the lack of any new leads and the lack of any useful information at all.

At ten-oh-two p.m., Castle strides out the elevator, absolutely certain that Beckett will be here.  She is.  And she doesn’t even notice him till he’s two strides away, lost in the murder board and the picture of the dead man.

“Castle!  What are you doing here?  I said I’d call you.  We got nothing, yet.  Nothing for you to make up crazy stories about.”

“I got bored.  I need some inspiration.”

“Yeah, I know all about your two-second attention span.”  Castle smiles wickedly, distracted for a moment from Beckett’s less than wholly welcoming attitude.

“Depends how interested in the matter at hand I am.”  The voice curls round Beckett, warm and enticing and overflowing with bad-boy charm and suggestiveness.  She knows just how focused his concentration can be, when he’s interested.  In the precinct and out.  He thumps down on the desk beside her, considerably closer than he would be at more civilised, or populous, moments.  Still, he doesn’t – quite – touch her: there’s a critical inch between them.  Beckett realises that he’s leaving opening moves up to her.  She glares at the board again and sighs wearily in its direction.

“What’s up?”

“I need a lead.  Look at it.”  She gestures exasperatedly at the thinly populated board.  “We got nothing.”

“Yet.”

“Huh?”

“We got nothing, _yet_.  Something’ll pop.”   He shrugs, staring at the board.  “Why don’t you walk me through it.  See if that helps.”

“Like that’s gonna improve matters,” she mutters.  But she tells him all about it anyway, even – though she’d promised herself she wouldn’t - the nature of Mrs Frankenstein’s alibi.  Castle looks as revolted as Montgomery had, but once he recovers from that shock and looks very much as if he’s found a seriously off-colour joke Beckett elbows him hard in the ribs and drives the breath he was planning to speak with out of him.  He’s sufficiently surprised that he’s winded, and develops a little-boy pout.

“That hurt, Beckett,” he says childishly, and obviously wholly untruthfully.  She raises a sceptical eyebrow.

“Sorry,” she replies insincerely.

“I’ll have a bruise.”  The other eyebrow adds its own quotient of scepticism.  “You need to kiss it better,” Castle points out, as if she should have seen that for herself.

“What are you, five?  You deserved it.”  He pouts again.  Somehow it’s a little less childish and a lot more sexy.  It’s almost irresistibly kissable.  She won’t be cozened, though.  Definitely not.

“I know why you won’t,” Castle smirks, with the air of one who’s made a great discovery.  “You’re scared.”

“Scared?  Scared of what?”

“Scared that you’ll like it.”  Beckett looks at him with utter disbelief.  She’s just about to open her mouth on a comment of how much he’d like it when a very familiar voice comes from behind her.

“Beckett, why are you still here?”

“Sir?”  What in hell’s name is Montgomery doing here at this hour?  Hard upon the heels of that thought is the sudden realisation that Castle must have seen him and rapidly switched to his irritating precinct annoying-ness that he’s been using in public since the day he arrived.  Just as well.

“ _I_ ” – Montgomery puts a great deal of Captainly emphasis on that word – “left my daughter’s birthday card, which I need first thing tomorrow morning, on my desk.  Why are _you_ still here, Detective?”  Montgomery has every intention of sending her home.  She shouldn’t be here.  She certainly shouldn’t be here with Castle.  Anything could happen.  Specifically, Beckett could come up with a dozen ways to murder Castle and dispose untraceably of the body, and Montgomery likes Castle and likes winning at poker.  Neither would continue to be the case if Castle were dead. 

Beckett recognises that she’s been busted.  “I was just leaving, sir.”  She doesn’t try to lie in the face of Montgomery’s piercing glare.  Instead she collects up her purse and jacket and makes for the elevator at a fast scuttle.  Castle follows her, admiring Montgomery’s style.  And, he thinks, Montgomery’s perfect timing.  He hadn’t thought that he’d get Beckett out for another half hour.  He can think of plenty uses for that half hour.  He looms over Beckett as the elevator doors shut and then pulls her into him.


	57. Stay the night

There isn’t time for Castle to do more than kiss Beckett once, hard and fast, before the elevator deposits them at the parking level.

“You want a ride, Castle?”  Oh yes.  He’s not necessarily referring to the car.

“Please.”  He slides in to take shotgun (not that he’d get the chance to drive.  He never does.  He will, though.  He’ll invite her out to his house in the Hamptons and he’ll drive.)  Once they’ve pulled out it’s time to improve the trip.  He stays quiet and looks her over with the undressing, predatory gaze that turns the air thicker, close and claustrophobic.

Beckett feels the shift in the atmosphere, and nibbles unconsciously on her lip.  She’d intended to have another solitary evening.  But… he’s given her space, and – admit it, Kate – she’s missed his presence, these last two nights.  Funny how quickly she’s got used to it.  To him.  She knows he’s watching her, waiting.

“See something interesting there, Castle?”

“Yeah.  Definitely interesting.”  His voice deepens and slows.  “I need to investigate it.  Find out whether, if I peel off the layers, it’ll get more interesting still.  Like playing pass the parcel: every time you strip off another covering you find something new to play with.”  There’s a subtle wriggle in the driver’s seat.

“What if there’s nothing to play with?”

“You can always find something to play with, once all the wrappings are removed.”

Mostly, and certainly consciously, he’s seducing her with subtext.  But under that is an unconscious manifestation of his desire to know all her secrets.  To find a _Kate_ , under the infinite layers of _Beckett_.  Maybe then he’ll be able to think of her as _Kate_.  He can’t, yet; even after the softness of the previous encounter.  He can’t even try her name out for size, because she won’t tell him it, and he can’t tell her how he found it out.  She will tell him it, though.  Soon.  It’ll prove – something, when _she_ tells him it.

She’s pulling up at her block.  It’s about that point that she realises that she hasn’t even asked him if he wanted to come back here.

“Want a coffee, Castle?  Or shall I take you to the loft?”

Castle hadn’t missed Beckett’s failure to provide a choice of destination, and had decided to let that play out and see where it took them.  He’s extremely satisfied with her unconscious assumption: that she _expects_ him to want to come home with her.  He likes that.  He very much likes that.

“Coffee, please.”   Beckett parks expertly in a very small space and then acquiesces to – no, encourages – Castle’s arm to descend about her shoulders.  It only takes very minor pressure for her to be comfortably folded in.  The elevator ride is mercifully short.  He’s only been without her for two nights and he’s reacting as if he’s been absent from her for a month.  He manages to control himself until Beckett’s shut the door behind them, put her gun away, and started for the kettle.  Getting between Beckett and her coffee is a bad idea.

But once the kettle’s on and all the accoutrements of coffee making are within Beckett’s easy reach, there’s a space before it boils which could usefully be filled.  He slides up behind her, places both large hands on her waist, and follows up by placing small, teasing kisses on the nape of her neck.  Beckett wriggles slightly into an acceptable alignment with her back to him and sighs contentedly.  For a moment, they simply stand so, as the air heats around them and Castle continues to kiss Beckett’s neck, moving round to the sensitive nerve below her ear.  When she shivers in reaction to that he moves his hands from her midriff: one around her to lie flat over her stomach, the size of his handspan easily allowing his thumb, should he so wish, to flirt with her breast; the other free to roam, but currently sitting promisingly over her belt buckle.  She’s held tightly, no easy way to touch or even kiss him; no way to stop him taking any delicious, dangerous action he decides upon.  For another instant Castle waits, allowing Beckett to recognise – and decide whether to accept - her inability to control events.  Any events.

Beckett’s breathing shortens; her stance softens; her hands rest on the counter.  Till now, matters have largely proceeded face-to-face.  Well, front-to-front.  She can feel Castle’s hard arousal pressing into her rear; the hard muscle of his arm preventing movement.  If she agrees, she’ll have no choice but to let him do as he wills.  Which, happily, coincides with what she wills.

“I thought you wanted coffee, Castle?” she breathes out, in her satiny-soft bedroom voice.  She feels its effect on him.

“I do.”  He pauses significantly.  “But I want you too.”  His flexible fingers undo her belt.  Hot tension rises around her, and moist warmth begins to gather below his hand.  She tries to shift, and finds that she can’t.  Moist becomes damp.  His thumb glides gently over her breast, without loosening his grip in any way.  She attempts to reach back, assert her own control.

“Uh-uh.  Hands flat on the counter, Beckett.”  She complies, slowly, excitement building.  He nudges a foot between hers.  She’s already moving her feet, the game becoming clear, when he nudges again.  “Feet apart.”  She opens her stance minimally.  “Wider.  I’ll tell you when to stop.”  When she’s sufficiently open that he could push one hard thigh between hers he stops her.  He continues to play over her breast, stretching the span of his fingers so that his thumb can reach her hard nipple.  She wriggles against him.  He flicks open the button of her pants, and slips a finger inside the waistband, a little down, not far enough for Beckett’s taste, judging by the edge on her gasp and the way she’s suddenly moving.  He smiles darkly and nibbles at her neck, softly enough not to leave a visible mark.  Marks are for them to see.  Not anyone else.  No-one else needs to know that he can own her, because she allows it. 

Beckett’s stopped focusing on the potential for coffee.  The only thing she’s focused on is Castle’s wicked fingers and the way he’s holding her.

“The kettle’s boiled, Beckett.  I thought you were making coffee?”  The teasing tone brings her back to the cups and cafetiere in front of her.

“I am.”  She tries to move out his arm.  It doesn’t work.  “If you want your coffee, you need to let go, Castle.”

“Why?  You can reach everything.”

“You can too,” she mutters, almost under her breath, “but you aren’t.”  She’s clearly not talking about the coffee.  He smiles more widely into her neck as she hrrumphs and starts to fill the cafetiere.  Once that’s done, and Beckett’s hands are safely off the hot coffee, Castle slides his finger down a little lower.  She wriggles, with a clear indication of intent, and he slips down further, curving the rest of his hand, and pauses fractions above where she wants him.  She wriggles more demandingly, managing to move despite his arm around her.

“Coffee, tea or me, Beckett?” Castle murmurs with a laugh.  “Wouldn’t want to scald us.”

“Depends.  Coffee never disappoints.”  Castle growls at her, gently but with some point.

“Have I ever …disappointed… you?”  He has a sudden thought and hurriedly adds, “in bed?”

“There’s always a first time,” Beckett grins.

“Oh well,” he says placidly, and removes his hand, though not his arm around her.  “I’d better settle for the coffee, then.”  He pours both of them a mugful and picks his up to take a drink.  There’s a short, shocked silence.  Castle smirks smugly where Beckett can’t see him.  If she’s going to tease… so is he.  “I wouldn’t want to risk disappointing you,” he continues, in the same bland tone.  It’s Beckett’s turn to growl.  “Is there something wrong?” he asks innocently.  Beckett growls again, and then buries her face in her coffee cup. 

Castle takes another long drink and puts his empty mug down.  He considers the amusement value of refilling it and continuing to wind up Beckett, and decides that while this form of teasing is fun, (and funny) if he wants to do anything else tonight it might be time to stop.  Beckett is perfectly capable of taking him at face value and telling him to go if she thinks he might really mean it.  (She shouldn’t think that.  She should know how he feels.)  He flexes the arm that’s still holding her in tight very slightly, to prove he’s still there.  When she puts down her own mug, he kisses the sensitive nerve at her ear.  There’s a noticeable relaxation into him. 

“Coffee’s done, Castle.”  He hums into her neck, and brings his free hand back to her stomach, circling the tips of his fingers slowly. 

“Where were we?”  Beckett loses what little patience she had maintained at that comment, takes his hand and forcibly moves it to where she wants it.  Well, she tries.  Much to her annoyance, his hand doesn’t move.  She applies a little more force, to as little effect.  His persistent circling is detaching her shirt from her pants, bunching it higher.  His little finger creeps on to bare flesh.  It sends sparks through her skin, arcing up to join the sparks that the teasing kisses at her neck are inducing.   She squirms, entirely instinctively.

“Ah yes, I remember.  We were here, weren’t we, Beckett?”  He slips his finger downward, over the bare flesh above her panties.  “Before you decided you liked coffee better.”  He wiggles his finger, and Beckett wriggles against him again, in the limited range she has.  She can feel how much he’s enjoying this.  If he slips any lower, he’ll know how much she is.  And then he starts to play over her breast again, and then uses that hand, slightly awkwardly as he’s still pressing her back into him, to undo her shirt from the neck down, scraping his palm over the hard point of each breast as he does, and she gasps and clenches her grip over his other hand and tries harder to force it downwards and get her own way.  Not for her, tonight, the soft, gentle making out of the other night.  She’s been unable to fight her way through the case, no solid ground as yet to make her charge upon, and so she needs hard, forceful reality now.  Castle seems to recognise her desire and stops his delicate teasing abruptly, finally sliding his hard fingers fully downward to cup her and touch the rapidly dampening silk beneath his hand.

“Is that what you wanted?”  He moves his fingers and she writhes.

“Yes.”

She stops thinking, whenever he plays with her, whenever those long, thick, dangerous fingers start to move so deliberately between her legs.  He’s just too good at this.  And at this angle, with him behind her and tight against her, she can’t do anything at all except try to reach round or turn her head, and even that’s limited.  She’s given him complete freedom to play and touch and tease and stimulate and drive her higher – and she has no freedom at all.  The stroking at her nipple and the synchronised stroking at her core are fuelling the heat of her desire.

“Hands back on the counter,” Castle commands.  “Don’t move them.”  She accedes, complies again.  He stops stroking, accompanied by her noise of displeasure.  An instant later, he’s pushed her pants off her hips, lifted one of her legs so that they drop to the floor, replaced her leg so she’s as widely poised as before, and then takes a step backward, pulling her with him, so that she’s slightly bent forward and open to him and when he brings his hand back to her she knows he can feel that she’s far more excited than before.

He slips and slides and glides her silk across her until she starts to emit sexy little gasps and whimpers, trying to move against him.  He still won’t allow anything more than the smallest of shifts, and his size and focused, applied strength leaves her breathless, as with his searching, wicked fingers: moulding and stroking and rolling over her breasts, flickering over taut nipples; stroking her soaked core through smooth, slippery silk; and all the time, in counterpoint to his fingers, his lips and tongue and edges of teeth dance at the open curve of her neck where her head has slumped forward.

And then his fingers slip under the silk and into the hot wetness beneath and _Castle_ she gasps out as he thrusts two hard digits into her and she can’t do anything to alter or affect how he’s winding her higher and tighter and need and imminent explosion are coiling through her body.

“Not yet,” Castle murmurs wickedly in her ear.  “It’ll be better if you have to wait.”  And he slows right down, brings her off the summit, stands her briefly upright to strip her shirt and re-positions her, paying no attention at all to her complaints.  And then he winds her up all over again, which takes less time than previously, and brings her down, again, which takes longer; and this time her complaints have acquired an edge of pleading.

By the fourth repetition there’s no complaining, only pleading and moans; and Castle’s breath is choppy and harsh on her skin as he’s rasping dirty talk into her neck and she dimly realises that it isn’t only she who’s being denied.  This is, it appears, a game that two are playing, but only one of them is in control of it.  Mostly.  Partly.  And then suddenly not at all, as she hears the scrape of zip and her sodden panties are immediately pushed aside and he’s inside her fast and hard and big and his teeth are in her shoulder and it feels _good_ and his hand palming her breasts and her moans are turning to screams and he brings his hand up to cover her mouth and muffle the noise and his other hand is rubbing over her roughly and she clamps her own teeth down on to her lip and _oh fuck_ when he thrusts again it’s all too good, too much, too hard and she comes apart around him and he’s hardly slower.

When his knees can work again Castle picks Beckett up and takes her to her bed, shucks his pants and shirt and lies down beside her.  In just a minute he’ll go and clean up.  Just in a minute.  He curls an affectionate arm over her and snuggles in; she wriggles back against him and that’s the last thing either of them know.

In the small hours, he’s woken by the absence of warm Beckett against him, and as the sleep rapidly clears under the pressure of panic that she’s gone he detects the small sounds of a shower.  Most unfortunately, from Castle’s point of view, it shuts off just as his brain wakes up enough to manage to tell his body to move.  It’s the first time he’s really regretted his inability to jump-start his existence when he wakes.  He has a nasty feeling Beckett might spring into instant intelligence in the morning.  That’s a serious flaw, if true.  He hasn’t really had a chance to find out, yet: he can hardly draw conclusions when nearly every time he’s been there it’s been preceded by some sort of lacerating quarrel or other emotional storm – not necessarily Beckett’s, either.  He’s sitting on the edge of the bed trying to persuade his still-asleep legs to walk to the bathroom when Beckett appears, in the same silky tee and shorts he’d seen before, slightly damp around the ends of her hair, and, when she gets closer, smelling deliciously of cherry body wash.  Her smooth cleanliness abruptly informs him that he’s still sweaty and sticky and undoubtedly revolting.

“Can I wash up too?”  He smiles invitingly.  “You could wash my back.  After all, I’ve washed yours.”

“I’ve already washed.  Now I’m going back to sleep.”  Her phrasing is careful.  Going back to bed would give entirely the wrong message.  “It’s two a.m., and I have to work tomorrow.  I need to sleep.”  She pauses, and takes a chance which she thinks isn’t really a chance at all.  “But you could stay.   Once you’ve cleaned up, I mean.”  There’s complete silence for several heartbeats.  Beckett’s face freezes.  “Or not, if you don’t want to.  Whatever.”  She walks around him and gets into the other side of the bed, her back to him.

“Beckett?”

“Yeah?”  Her voice is muffled by the pillow.

“I do want to stay.”

“Fine.”  It doesn’t sound fine to Castle.

“You surprised me.”  Castle has just realised that Beckett’s upset that he didn’t answer.  “I didn’t expect you to ask.”  Again.  She’s asked, _again_.  He turns and pulls her over so he can see her.  She’s acquired that frozen, closed-off look that he hates.  The look that he is simply _not having_ any more.  There’s only one thing he can do about it.  So he does.  Regardless of his unwashed state, he hauls her up and on to his mouth and kisses her in a way there’s no mistaking: hard and possessive and unarguably in command.

“I’m staying,” he bites out, still edged with the anger that she thinks he’s rejecting her offer without even waiting a beat to let him recover from the shock that she’s _asked_ him for something, anything, more than once so it _wasn’t a mistake_. (and below that his heart thuds _she asked me to stay she asked me to stay she asked me to stay_ ; bass beat under the music of their dance)

“You don’t _get_ to shut me out.”  He holds her head so she’s forced to look at him.  “You’re _mine_ and you do not get to shut me out.”  He kisses her again: searching, finding and conquering.  When he lifts from her she’s looking at him, dazed.  “Now.  I’m going to clean up, and then I’m staying.”

When he’s finished she’s asleep.  As he joins her he’s still thinking _she asked me for something_. _Twice._

* * *

 

There’s nothing to do the following day but send the boys back to the doctor’s office and clinic. This time, though, they find something, though it takes them most of the day.  In among all the wedding planning that will never come to fruition, and a dozen empty energy bar wrappers, is a heavily redacted patient file.  The clinic staff know nothing about it.  Even the surgeon’s main nurse wasn’t aware, which is seriously weird, because he never operated without her.  Never.  Except this time he did.

Back in the precinct, chasing the file through the patient records is a bust.  No record at all.  None.  Until Castle has a moment of inspiration – or extreme cynicism, more likely – and suggests that the billing department is the best place to find everything.  Or everyone.  It works.  They get an account number – it’s easy: the bills were paid promptly and in full, which is sufficiently unusual (unique, Beckett thinks cynically) to be memorable.  And, when they chase the account number down, the bill was paid by – the Government?  What?  That’s strange – oh God.  That means Witness Protection.  That means the US Attorney’s office.  That’s a problem.  It’s always a problem.  Well, they’ll try to do it through the direct route.  Beckett doesn’t have a lot of hope of that working, but they have to try.  She’ll play nice with the US Attorney.

Unfortunately, when she meets the US Assistant Attorney, she won’t play nice with her.  Won’t play at all, in fact.  Won’t even go near the playground.  There’s absolutely nothing more to be done with her.


	58. Take me, I'm yours

By mid-afternoon Beckett’s been staring fixedly at the murder board for four hours without a single idea coming into her head.  Well, except for a dozen ways to torture the information she needs out of the assistant US Attorney, which would be illegal.  Satisfying, but illegal.  Her mood does not improve one iota when Castle informs her that if she glares any harder at the board it will burst into flames and further informs her that she needs a break.  She should come out the precinct for a walk.  She refuses, bluntly.  But he just keeps going on and on and on about it while she grumps and growls and grimaces and finally gives up and agrees simply to shut him up.  He hustles her into the elevator before she has a chance to change her mind, though her complaints about leaving are clearly audible through the closing doors.

“Shit,” ejaculates Esposito.  “Never thought I’d see that.  Beckett takin’ a break?  When she’s thinkin’ about a case?  You see any fat pink pigs flappin’ at the window, Ryan?”

“Beckett being persuaded to take a break,” says Ryan, with heavy emphasis on _persuaded_.  “Should mark it on the calendar.  New National Holiday.”

“Writer-Boy must have bigger stones than I thought.”  Esposito’s voice drops to an almost-inaudible level.  “Maybe he really can stop her flaming out.”  Then he returns to normal tones.  “Does he know she’ll shoot him for interfering in her thinkin’ about the case?”

“Nah, she won’t.”  Esposito’s question is obvious to Ryan.  “She’ll never shoot him where she might get caught.  She’ll wait till she can hide all the evidence.  ‘S not as if she doesn’t know how.”

“Who might shoot who and hide the evidence, Detectives?”  Montgomery’s soft, enquiring tones cause both men to jump.  It’s entirely unfair, Esposito thinks, that Montgomery can sneak up on them like that.  He’s ex-Special Forces, for Chrissake.  People shouldn’t be able to sneak up on him.  And that’s the second time Montgomery’s managed it this month.  He’ll put a bell on him, next time.

“Er… Detective Beckett, sir.  Might be shooting Castle.”  Montgomery raises his eyebrows.

“And why might Beckett shoot Castle?”  _This time_ is clearly understood by all three men. 

“Er… well… he… um… er…”  Ryan’s clearly fumbling for words to describe the situation.  Montgomery’s eyebrows rise considerably further and indicate complete disbelief.   “He convinced her to take a break.” 

“ _What?_ ”  Montgomery’s eyebrows being unable to rise any further, his jaw drops instead.  The boys have never, ever seen Montgomery so completely and utterly discombobulated.  For all his twenty-five years’ experience, he looks and sounds as astounded as a rookie on his first case.

“Really,” Esposito says firmly. 

“Really really,” adds Ryan, sounding exactly like Donkey from Shrek.

 “But she’d never shoot him where she might get caught,” the boys babble in tandem.

“Castle convinced Beckett to take a break?”  Montgomery’s voice cracks into a squeak.  “How the hell did he do that?  How is he not dead on the floor?”

“He just kept talking till Beckett stood up and then he hustled her into the elevator and then she was gone.”

“We could hear her complaining, though.  Pretty much all the way down.”

“She took a break?  She didn’t kill him?”  Montgomery says again, as if he can’t believe his own eyes and ears.

“Not yet.  Leastways, it’s not been called in if she did.”

Montgomery closes his flapping mouth before he catches flies and wanders off to his office, muttering animatedly to himself.  It sounds to Esposito’s well trained ears something like _Hot damn!  Never thought the boy could do it._

“Do what?  What’s he talking about?”  says Ryan, into Espo’s ear.

“Not what your dirty mind is thinking,” Esposito chides, looking at the grin on Ryan’s face.  “Make her stop, even for a minute or two.”

“How so?”

“If it was the other, he’d have claimed his winnings, dumbass.  He bet on this week.”

* * *

 

Every step that Beckett takes is accompanied by the hard, irritated clack of her heels landing on the sidewalk concrete.  She continues complaining bitterly and volubly that this is pointless, a waste of investigative time, and that Castle is an oversize bully who’s forced her out by never shutting up until the only alternatives were coming out for a walk or shooting him – and she’s not going down for Murder One because of him and seeing as he’s convinced the boys and Lanie that he has some redeeming features though personally she doesn’t see it they won’t even help her dispose of the body and what is the point of this anyway – until they’re past East Houston heading down toward Broome Street and Castle quite unreasonably stops her complaints by possessing himself of her hand and then kissing her briefly but enthusiastically.  That’s not fair, either.

“Do you want an ice-cream, Beckett?”

“No,” she hrrumphs.  She wants to be back at her murder board, solving the case.

“Coffee?”

“No.”  She wants a lead, dammit.  A solution.  Not a treat, as if he’s cheering up a cross child.  She’s not a sulky toddler.  (Looking at her face, quite a number of people might have suggested otherwise.)

“What?”  The shock in Castle’s voice is palpable.  He comes to a juddering halt in the middle of the sidewalk and, since he’s still holding her hand, so does Beckett.  “You – you! – don’t want a coffee?  Are you sick?”  He almost sounds worried.  “Are you dead?” A pause. “Oh God.  You’re not… not…” another pause.  Oh hell.  He’s thinking of the _other_ reason she might not drink coffee.  Well, it’s not _that_.  She is absolutely, definitely, incontrovertibly sure it’s not that.  _That_ would be an absolute, total, disaster.  Fortunately, she also has absolute certainty that it’s not the case. 

“You’re not… a pod person?”  Phew.  That could have been a discussion that could only ever lead to extreme embarrassment.

“No.  I don’t want ice-cream.  I don’t want coffee.”  She pulls her hand away, crossly.  “I want a lead.”  And then it becomes clear why Castle wanted her out of the precinct for this discussion.  He knows – _she_ knows this, it’s no help – that the US Attorney deals with organised crime.  Yes, Castle, that’s the problem.

“So?” she says, irritated by his statements of the blindingly obvious.

“So what if we ask the other side?”  That’s insane.  That is the dumbest idea Castle has ever had in his entire time at the precinct spinning stories and coming up with ever-dumber theories.  It’s unbelievably stupid.  It’s so stupid… it’s so stupid… it’s so stupid she can’t even think of a word to describe how stupid it is.  He must have been smoking something.  Or shooting up in the men’s restroom.  He must have got something from one of Narcotics’ well-known ‘friends’.  This is _insane_.

“You want to ask the mob who the witness is?” she says flatly.  Disbelief drips from her voice.  Castle smiles happily, as if it’s the obvious solution.  She contemplates feeling his forehead to see what temperature he’s running.  Clearly he’s delirious.

“Clearly, they already know who he is if they're trying to kill him. Like you said, he's got to be a significant witness in a pretty big case.” 

“So what do we do, hop in the car, drive down to Bada Bing?”  She couldn’t be more sarcastic if she tried.  This is _insane_.  Castle’s been watching far too much TV.

“I know a guy. He owes me a favour.”  Of course he does.  Doesn’t everyone _know a guy_ in the Mob?  How’s he owed a favour by a mobster?  That’s just …well, _insane._   Like this whole situation.

“You _know a guy_? What is this, a Mamet play?”

No matter how hard or for how long Castle pleads with her, Beckett absolutely refuses to go with him to meet his criminal friend.  He’s likely enough to get beaten up or shot without taking a cop with him to ensure it.  Strangely, the Mob don’t normally invite the cops in for tea parties: seems they’re not welcome.  Vice versa, however, would be just fine, from a cop perspective.  If their invited guests would come.

A couple of hours later Castle rolls into the bullpen slightly flavoured with Scotch and sporting a thoroughly smug, self-satisfied smile.  Beckett is unreasonably relieved.  Of course she’d not been worried.  No.  Castle always lands on his expensively shod feet.  Just like a cat.  Well, yes she had worried, as time ticked by.  Just a bit.  Quite a lot.  Oh _fuck_.  How did that happen?  She doesn’t worry about him.  Not like that.  He can take care of himself.  She doesn’t care – aw, _hell_.  She does.  She does care.  This was _not_ supposed to happen.  _Now_ what?  Oh, _shit._

She rejects the idea of finding a comforting brick wall to bang her head against for the next hour until she’s managed to eject that problem from her brain.  Or kill herself.  Instead she preserves a mildly interested face (covering up her complete panic) and inquires whether there had been any useful information exchanged, as well as alcohol and pleasantries.  And amazingly, there has.  Jimmy the Rat Moran, loan shark, extortionist and all-around lowlife.  Talking to him isn’t going to be easy.  His Mob protectors won’t play.  The US Attorney won’t play.  She’s not even going to go there.  But there is another option.  She smiles, nastily.  Time to call in that favour.  Sooner than she’d expected, but that’s no hardship.  She doesn’t want any remaining connection between Sorenson and her.

“You have your sources. I have mine,” she says, as Castle plays down any chance of the assistant US Attorney helping out.  She’d never expected that to change.  But Castle is surprisingly quick off the deductive mark.

“Oh, it's not your ex-boyfriend, is it?  Mr. FBI.  Tall, brooding and judgmental?”  That’s got an edge to it.  _Be very, very careful, Castle_.  If he does anything to interfere with the job, that will be fatal.  Metaphorically speaking.  Probably.  And whatever it does to the case, it will certainly be fatal to anything else.  She won’t have anyone interfering in how she does her job.  No-one.

“Why, yes, in fact, it is. Is that a problem?”  There’s a sharp note in her voice, too.  And then Castle redeems himself.

“No. Not for me.”  He sounds, in fact, entirely calm.  The look in his eyes is a different matter altogether.  Blue eyes aren’t normally green, in the precinct strip lights.  But he’s not interfering.  It’s still all good.  If he can manage to stay backed off now, when it’s Sorenson, he’ll never interfere with her life.  “But then again, I'm not the one he's trying to get back together with,” he carries on, in a tone that tells the boys it’s all a great joke and simultaneously makes them think Castle’s just winding her up like he does every day. 

Beckett marches off to the interview lounge to make her call.  She’s not looking forward to it, but it has to be done.  Still, it doesn’t require an audience.  The fewer people who know that she’s skirting the edge of professionalism the better.

“Sorenson.”

“Agent Sorenson.  Detective Beckett.”  She needs to keep this formal, to get through it in the shortest possible time.  She really does not want to waste a single moment in chit-chat.  “I’m calling in my favour.”

In the minimum possible time, she’s cut the call and got out again.  She can’t meet Sorenson till tomorrow, and there’s absolutely nothing more that can be done tonight.  She should be off-shift tomorrow, but this one’s off the books, so it better be off-shift too.  Come to think of it, they should all be long off shift now.  Time to call it quits.

“Enough for tonight, guys.  I need a beer.  Who wants one?”  There’s general consternation but absolutely not a hint of disagreement.

Magically, they end up in the same bar that Beckett and Esposito both recognise, for different reasons.   Neither of them mention it.  It doesn’t look as if the bar’s been cleaned since the last time Beckett was there.  By unspoken mutual agreement, everybody decides on bottled beer.  Poisoning isn’t in the schedule for the days ahead.  They don’t discuss the case: some precinct gossip, a lot of baseball, a game or two of pool, where Esposito cleans up.  Fairly early, Castle claims paternal duties and peels off to go home, and not long after that the party breaks up.

Entirely unsurprisingly, there’s a text from Castle on Beckett’s phone.  Just as well her phone had been buried in her purse where no-one could hear it chirp, suspiciously soon after Castle had left the bar.  It simply says _Come by_.

Beckett ends up getting the first cab that’s free.  The boys insist, in fact, that she takes the first cab.  Funny, that.  They’re perfectly happy that she’s first through the door into a gunfight, but they won’t let her wait without them for the next cab to come along?  How does that work?  Huh.  Male logic.  There’s a contradiction in terms.  She gives the cabbie her address – since the boys can hear her – waits until the cab has pulled away and she is indubitably out of their earshot before she tells the driver to aim for Broome Street.  He grunts in displeasure on the subject of flighty females but takes her where she wants to go.

When Castle opens the door he greets Beckett in his best smooth, slick, casual tones.  Given his earlier expressions, and the repressed feelings radiating from him in the bar, she’d expected him to fall on her without even pausing for hello. More, she’d hoped for it.  She’d felt tarnished by talking to Sorenson, and she’d wanted Castle to polish her clean again.  Although _clean_ wasn’t, possibly, the precise word that she could have chosen to describe what she wanted him to do.

Castle’s self-restraint is fully explained when Beckett sees that Martha is lounging on the couch.  She glances up and looks absolutely delighted to see Beckett.  That, in itself, would be just about bearable.  It’s the immediate follow-up look of a dedicated bloodhound on a live trail that isn’t.

“Detective Beckett!  How lovely, darling.  Come and sit down.”  She gestures expansively with her wineglass.  “Have a drink.  Richard, sweetie, pour the girl a drink.”  She turns back to Beckett, who’s still standing.  Castle is entirely unsurprised to see the sharp tension bleeding into her shoulders and stiffening her posture.

“I…”

“Nonsense, darling.  There’s nothing so important that you can’t stop for a glass of wine and a nice chat.”  Ooops.  That was exactly the wrong thing for his mother to say.  Beckett’s back straightens rigidly.

“I’m afraid it is,” Beckett says coolly.  “I need to talk to Castle about the case.  Privately.”  It’s perfectly polite, and closes any possibility of conversation off as sharply as a blade.  Martha looks rather nonplussed by the refusal, but doesn’t get the chance to say anything more, as Castle rapidly ushers Beckett to his study before his mother gets an opportunity to ruin things.  Again.

He shuts the door firmly and pulls her into him, demanding her mouth and sliding one hand up into her hair so that there’s no possibility that she can move away.  Not that she was planning to.  He kisses her as if he’s proving a point.

“If I’d known she was going to be here tonight, I’d have come to yours,” he says ruefully.  The apologetic tone is not at all matched by his gestures.  His hand slides down into the curve of her back and presses her into him.

“Don’t you wait for an invitation, Castle?”  She’d intended to tease.  But as soon as the words leave her lips he’s back on her mouth, plundering and possessive and passionate and dominating.  She fights back, but Castle’s in no mood to concede anything.  He hauls her closer and grinds into her and she digs sharp nails into his shoulders to drag him closer still.  His hand slides down over her ass and between her legs and she squirms against him.

“I don’t want to share.” He _won’t_ share.  “You’re _mine_.  Just us. Just me.”

Beckett drags her brain, which is rather behind the curve of events, into a semblance of activity; being mostly complete confusion at Castle’s words.  All she manages is the somewhat unhelpful _Huh_?

“I’m not sharing.  Not with anyone.”  No, that still makes no sense at all.  She pushes hard at his shoulders and when he registers it and steps back slightly looks him straight in the eye. 

“I don’t share either,” she says.  She’s suddenly remembered why he’s reacting like this.  Why she is. 

“I’ve got far more reason than you to dislike Sorenson.  But unless you want your mother to take one look at you and start asking questions that you really do not want to answer, we need to stop this now.”  She stares at him forcefully.  “Right now.  We are going to pretend we’ve been talking about the case.  I am going to go home, and you will turn up at my door later.  No arguments.”  He loves being in control, loves when she does what he tells her.  But her firm snap of command, exactly as she would use in the precinct, is going straight to his groin.

“Okay.  But when I do, you’ll find out the consequences of ordering me around like this.”  She smiles very slowly, syrupy seduction covering every inch of his skin with the white phosphorus of flammable desire.

“Good,” she purrs.  “I’ll look forward to it,” and the ripped-silk husky bedroom voice means it’s all he can do not to take her there and then.

“So when I get there, I expect you to be appropriately dressed.”  _Oooh.  Ooohhh yes.  I’m going to blow your mind, Castle.  And then I’m going to blow – other things._   She slithers against him, boneless as a cat and much more strokable, and turns away.

As she exits the study she’s talking about the case in crisp, brisk precinct tones.  She bids a civil farewell to Martha, who again looks ready to invite her to stay for a drink and, no doubt, another round of interrogation and unconcealed interest in her discussions (or something of that nature) with Castle.  It’s her normal forceful stride, but as she reaches the door and she’s out of view of anyone other than Castle her hips sway in a way that screams _take me I’m yours_ louder than an F-15 Eagle taking off.

She picks up a taxi home for speed – she doesn’t think that Castle’s going to be that far behind her, though she should have at least an hour – and is whipping through a shower with extreme rapidity five minutes after she’s through the door.  She slows up when she starts stroking on her smoothest cherry moisturiser, though, enjoying the soft, sensuous feel of the cream on her skin.  She prowls across to her closet and rummages right at the back of one very particular shelf.  As she extricates the garments she’s looking for her smile turns from sensual to feral.  It’s been a long time since she’s worn these.  They’ll still fit, though.  Her dress size hasn’t altered since she was twenty – if anything, she’s tauter, more finely honed, now.  It’s fair to say that these don’t constitute a dress, though.  Dresses have rather more… coverage.

She dresses slowly, and then turns to the equally important matter of reapplying her make-up.  With a few significant changes from her daytime style.  Pitch black liner, smudged to make her eyes enormous, slanted to ensure the maximum resemblance to a cat.  Though petting isn’t where she means to be, this evening.  Oh no.  She doubts there will be any petting at all.  Midnight black mascara, extending her long lashes as far as she can.  Crimson lipstick, slashing the semblance of blood across her mouth.  Once again, she’s dressed to kill.  Tonight, she’s killing the memories of the men who’d let her down, in the arms and body of the one who hasn’t.  Time for some decisions: after today’s revelation.  Satisfaction curls darkly, deeply, through her, coiling in her lower abdomen and leaving her liquid.  One more thing to do.  She removes four silk scarves from her collection, and, after a moment’s thought, a fifth.  One other item takes its place on the nightstand.  Her smile is knife-blade sharp, as she looks approvingly up and down her reflection in the mirror and across to the items she’s laid out.

By the time he knocks peremptorily on the door, she’s shrouded in her heavy, tactile satin robe, tied firmly in a bow to the side of her waist, covering her from neck to ankle.


	59. I want to be your fantasy

When Beckett opens the door to Castle and he sees the midnight-dark eyes and blood-red lips on her face; the feral smile, he’s instantly sure that this night will not involve softness or care.  Beckett, even swathed in satin, looks like the epitome of dark, forbidden sexuality.  She looks, in fact, as if she’s in the same zone as she had been the first night they’d been together, when he’d kissed her after taking her out to dinner and everything had exploded in half a second flat.  His smile turns predatory as he closes the door.  Beckett’s expression matches it, and he realises she must be wearing incredibly high heels, as she’s almost exactly at his eye level.

She slinks across the room, the sensual, fluid, feline prowl that means a hot, wild night: that she’ll scratch and claw and he’ll leave this place with the marks of her ecstasy written across his back and shoulders unless he imposes some restraint upon her.  She doesn’t look as if she’s prepared to entertain self-restraint.  It occurs to him to wonder what exactly she might be wearing.  He suddenly suspects that she doesn’t expect him to entertain self-restraint either.  His smile becomes darker, hotter; his expression somehow harder; his body bigger, more dominant, more masculine.  The air crackles between them; their eyes dark and intent only on each other.  The tide of darkness rises over them.  Her edged smile dares him to begin, to make her surrender, to mark her as his.   He stalks her, stops two short strides away, runs a hot hard gaze from her eyes to her _fuck-me_ heels.

“Take the robe off, Beckett.”  His voice is a full octave below normal; vibrating over her skin and settling in; his words are an unsoftened command.  The edges in her smile grow yet sharper.  She undoes the bow with one quick tug, flexes her shoulders and the robe drops to the floor.

Oh _fuck._   He simply looks.  He can do no other; couldn’t move if he wanted to.  She’s a fallen angel; Lucifer’s lover; or Lilith: a woman to launch a thousand mortal sins.  Kings and kingdoms would fall breathless before her, for one instant of her presence. 

She’s wearing black.  Black basque, black panties, black stockings, black stilettos.  Crimson red lacing, tracing up the front of the basque.  Crimson red ribbons, holding the panties together at each side.  The basque stops, over her breasts, a quarter of an inch above complete indecency.  He doesn’t hear his own growl.  She looks him over with hot green eyes.

“You’re overdressed, Castle.”  And she takes the two steps that separate them and, far too fast for him to catch her hands given his lust-stunned state, whips his shirt open and off.  “That’s better.” 

His body doesn’t wait for his brain.  His hands are on her neck and back, his mouth on hers; he’s captured her against him so that he can feel every inch of her lithe body on his, so that he can hold her to him and never, never let her go.  He raids and ravages and plunders her mouth, defeating each attempt she makes to fight back, to take control; using sheer size and strength to pin her in place and take everything she gives, swallowing her moans.  He can feel the sharp bite of nail into his shoulders, the skin already broken, and _shit_ it feels so _good_ when she does that but if she’s already in that mood then there’s not going to be any restraint at all unless he puts it there.  His hands roam over the flexing of her body and _oh_ she’s already soaked and open and so incredibly _hot_ and he has to make this good for her but she’s already burned out his brain and there is only the moment and the motion and the movement of her against him and if he simply touches her _there_ maybe she’ll slow down for long enough to bank the fires for just an instant so that he can treat her the way she wants, the way she deserves, the way he’ll treat her forever.  _Everything she wants, everything she needs._   He’ll be her everything.

He slides forceful fingers down from her neck to the centre of her back to keep her pressed against him and uses his now freed other hand to smooth across that sinfully almost-opaque fabric, (chiffon, say his fingertips, and silk, which together only just conceal the salient areas and promise seductive, sensual delight) and around and over her hip and the way she moves is doing _nothing_ to allow him to slow this down at all but he brings his hand down between them and over her and she’s so hot and so wet and it’s all for him, only for him, always for him, and he slips firm digits under the silk and into her and muscles clench around his fingers and his thumb moves just once and she’s screaming his name into his mouth and then goes limp against him.

He picks her up, deposits her on her bed and slips her shoes off; doesn’t fail to spot the accoutrements on the nightstand and rapidly ensures that he’s left only in boxers; comes down to lie beside Beckett just as she opens dark eyes and reaches for him, sliding over him and _that_ movementwon’t help him maintain his own control one little bit but she’s already scraping nails along his chest and her teeth are nipping sharply into his shoulder and the small swift bites are taking him further from control with every scratch of her teeth and following soft wet stroke of her tongue and he was going to make her feel so good but right now she’s wholly in control and he doesn’t get a say because he can’t do anything but react and she makes him feel _so damn good_.  She’s played to every single one of his fantasies about how she might dress for him and he’s as unable to control himself now as a college boy at his first strip joint party.  He gives himself completely over to her and lets her do whatever she chooses.  He’ll take back control, later.  For now, it’s all hers.

She moves down his body and then stops and he whimpers – he _never_ makes that noise during sex, but then this is so far beyond sex there’s just no comparison – but she’s reaching over him and _what are you doing_ and she wraps the scarf around his head and he can’t see anything and _is this how it felt for her_? and _ohh_ she’s gone back to where she left off and _ow_ that will be a mark tomorrow and it’s just as well it’ll be hidden because teeth marks in your torso are just a little difficult to explain away but _fuck_ he’s always liked just a little bit of edginess, a little flick of pain even when he’s most dominant and then he stops thinking and just feels.  Blindness makes every touch more intense, more sensitive, more erotic.

Beckett knows that she’ll pay for what she’s doing to Castle, later.  She’s looking forward to it.  There are all sorts of deliciously dark ways that he can take his revenge and she’s sure that he will.  But right now, she’s got the upper hand and she’s going to _use_ it.  She bites down hard enough to leave a mark and hears his gasp and the catch and rasp of his subsequent breathing with midnight delight.  She knows that he likes that.  She knows she’ll have equivalent marks, later.  Ownership, possession, goes in both directions.  No matter who is on top.  She nibbles down his body and swirls her tongue indecently over his nipples, his navel, the line of hair beneath – and stops.  He’s completely rigid beneath her.  She slides his boxers down and frees him, slipping her thumb over his tip, running sharp nails from root to tip and back again; over and over; driving him higher till he’s in the same state of uncontrolled heat that she’s so often been brought to by him.  When she bypasses his hot hard weight and laves small kisses down his quads he tries to pull her back to where it’s so very obvious he wants her, but she evades his questing hands.

“Uh-no.  You stay still, Castle.”  All he can muster in response is a groan.  She licks a wet trail round the circumference of each thigh, bites lightly.  He groans louder.  “What do you want, Castle?”  More indefinable noises.  She knows what he wants.  But he’s going to beg, like she does, and has, and will.  She’s going to make him beg for her.  “Use your words.  What do you want?”  She dances fingers dirtily across him.

“You.  I want you.”  He can hardly pronounce the words, and his baritone is close to bass with sheer desire.  The normal treacle tones of his seductions of her are sandpaper rough and his breathing scrapes loudly in the moonless dark of her bedroom.

“Here I am.  What do you want?”  Her words drip sex from every syllable.  He can hear her own desire underpinning every sound.

“Your mouth.  I – _ohhh_ – want your mouth.”  She slithers right back up over him, squirming over every inch of skin except the ones where he really wants her to be, and kisses him hard, taking his mouth as if there’s not the slightest possibility that she doesn’t have the right to take everything she wants, everything he’s got, everything he is.

“That what you meant?”  She’s teasing, taunting: she knows exactly what he meant but it’s her game now and he can’t, won’t stop her because even though he’s never on the bottom, when it’s her, here, now, she’s just so inconceivably hot he’ll let her do anything she pleases.

“No,” and it’s almost a moan now.  “Your mouth on me.  Sucking me.”  He can’t see her face, can only feel the glide of her smooth legs and the soft, seductive chiffon as she slithers back downward to where he needs her to be.  But then she stops again, before she should.  She flickers her tongue far too briefly across him.

“Like that?  Ask nicely, Castle.”  She does it once more, and stops, and waits.  “Say that I own you.”  He can’t speak, only groans.  “Say that you’re _mine_.”  She bends her head and he senses the ends of her hair just touching him and she blows across him and _fuck_ he’s going to _shoot too soon_ and then she lifts away and gives him a chance to come down and for the taut spring of incipient orgasm to uncoil and _oh_ she’s not allowed to edge him, that’s his game, and he will make her pay for that but first he needs her mouth on him and she won’t do it if he doesn’t ask but he’s never begged a woman for anything ever and he’s never let anyone own him but it’s Beckett and _oh Christ Beckett please Beckett yes I’m yours only yours_ and she gives him what he wanted and her mouth is so hot and so filthy and she’s so unbelievably _good_ at this and he’s still spilling _please, fuck, yours, please_ from his mouth as he spills helplessly into hers and his world simply disappears into her.

When he re-emerges the blindfold is off, and much to his delight (and not a little relief) Beckett hasn’t taken the opportunity to cuff him to the bed.  That’s a long step further than he’d like to go.  She’s draped sensually over him, but when she feels him start to move with purpose again she returns to life too.  She rises above him.

He’s had enough of that game.  It’s his turn now.  Time to slow this up, to take back the lead, before he can’t.  He catches her just before she slithers down his body again and leaves him utterly unable to function, rolls them both over and pinions her under him, kisses her till she’s as short of breath and thought as he, till she’s gripping him as tightly as she can and it’s time to change this up.  He pulls her hands above her head and holds them there in one of his, reaches for two scarves and the service cuffs that Beckett had so carefully placed within reach.

Beckett feels the soft wrapping of silk around her wrists and then the close of cold steel over that and squirms against Castle’s bulk holding her in place, already close to orgasm again.  He’s so _good_ at what she likes.  He rolls off again, and she whimpers.  She wants him there, pressing her down, hard against her in just the right places, and then hard inside her, filling her.

“Why _five_ scarves, I wonder.”  It’s phrased as a question, but voiced as a statement.

“Don’t you know what to do with them?” Beckett taunts huskily, stretched out in front of him, and licks her lips salaciously.  “Shall I tell you?”

“You haven’t argued with my choices so far,” Castle murmurs, and smiles darkly as he trails a hand across her lithe body and down over her thigh towards her knee.  “So many options.  Which one might I like best?”  He leans in and kisses her deeply.  She mewls as he nudges her knees apart.  “Open?” he purrs dangerously.  She writhes in response to the tone and it’s all he can do not to undo those wicked, teasing, little red bows at her hips and just stick with the options that _open_ provides without teasing her any further.  “Or closed?”  There’s another mewl as he plays a little and Beckett struggles and fails to find speech that actually contains words instead of indeterminate noises. 

With her arms already restrained, she can’t get any leverage to stop him using the other scarves any way he pleases.  She’d known that this would be the result, when she’d laid it out, when the heat had roiled in her body as she dressed, (if she could call it _dressing_ ) when she’d taken charge.  Now it’s his turn, and anticipation is already bringing her to the boil.   She doesn’t know which way he’ll take this: but she’s absolutely sure that she’ll enjoy it.  When he attaches a scarf around each ankle, she thinks she knows.  When he stops there, and uses the final scarf to blindfold her just as she had done to him, she’s sure that in a short moment she’ll be held spread wide and he’ll be able to play with her any way he chooses till she’s soaked (she’s _already_ soaked) and screaming for his possession. And then he stretches her full length, crosses her ankles over each other and fastens the scarves to the end of the bed and she realises that Castle is in fact the most diabolical man – or incubus – in all creation.  Whatever he does, until he uncrosses her ankles she is completely unable to get friction of any sort where she already desperately needs it.  Unless, of course, he provides it.  And even then, like this, it will be strictly limited.

“What are you _doing_?” she stammers out, panting and hopelessly desperate for him.

“I think you know what I’m doing,” Castle growls. “You tried to top me.”

“Succeeded,” she mutters.  Castle growls again.

“Now I’m going to show you what that means for you.  You can’t do anything to help yourself.  I’m going to play with you until you can’t do anything but beg, until you’ve no words left, until you can’t even whimper you’re so turned on.”  She’s sure he’s smiling ferally down at her.  “And you’re going to love every minute of it.”  He kisses her, hard and deep and uncompromising.  “Every minute I edge you.”  She can’t even wriggle, can’t arch against him, can’t show him how turned on she already is.  “You’re going to see stars.”

He kisses her again, roughly, making it clear that now he’s wholly in charge.  She opens under his lips like it’s her last night on earth, wholly sure that this is what, and who, she wants.  _All in_.  He licks round her ear, stops and nibbles delicately, dangerously, on the nerve there.  She tries to wriggle, and can’t.  He nibbles some more, the slight rasp to his breath and the very evident weight against her thigh telling her that he’s just as excited, as into, this arrangement as she is; that it’s a test of his control of himself again.

He moves downward, paying close and deliberate attention to her neck, the join of her shoulder, the soft skin over her collarbones and he moves to one side, nips, sucks, leaves a possessive mark and she gasps and can’t arch to him, can’t move, can’t do anything about the desire flooding her body and pooling between her legs and already wrapping round her brain.  All she can do is accept the sensations and the way in which he makes her feel so very, very good.  She dimly thinks that if this is depravity she’ll order a lifetime’s supply, next-day delivery.  Then he mirrors his actions on the other side and she squeaks, tending to a whimper.  And then he starts to _talk_ again in his deep, distilled syrup-of-sex voice, vibrating over the curve of her breasts and sinking smoothly through her skin, and _fuck_ she could come from just his voice talking dirty to her and very nearly is _._ If there’s a book called the Bad Boy’s Guide to Sex and Seduction then it’s certain that Castle read the audio version.

“Like that?  Like knowing that I’ve marked you for my own?  You’re mine, and you know it, and before we’re done you’ll scream it.”  He shifts a little further down and turns full attention to her breasts, gentle nips and rolls through the chiffon, then sliding the fine fabric over her peaked, squirmingly sensitive nipples till she’s panting and gasping and desperate to push into his touch.  “Something you want, Beckett?”

“More,” she moans, and relapses into wordless noises.  She can feel herself impossibly, hopelessly wet and aroused, but no matter how she tries she can’t help herself.  She’s so _close_ and her noises are getting nearer and nearer to frantic pleading and he stops playing with her.

“I think you need a moment.”  Oh _fuck_ he really meant it.  He’s going to keep doing this for as long as he pleases or until she safe-words out.   Which she really does not want to do because this is what she’s wanted deep down since the moment she first saw him and her dreams told her that weeks before she admitted it to herself.  He doesn’t even need toys to do it for her.  Just her scarves and cuffs and his mouth and fingers and body. 

When she’s dropped back a little he goes back to her breasts and this time he rolls her nipples with his tongue until she’s right back on the edge and then – _bastard_ – he stops and waits again and this is just so wholly unfair – _ohhh_ – and she’s begging now, _please more, please Castle_ , _let me move_ but he won’t and then he starts to demonstrate just how limited she is as he stops playing with her breasts and before she can even take a breath to complain he’s slipped one finger between her thighs and pressed on her through her panties and words are _not_ on her mind right now but he’s whispering devilishly in her ear and simply pressing without even moving is so _hot_ and she’s not sure it’s possible for her to be any wetter without actually dissolving.

“This is all you can have.”  She whimpers pleadingly.  “Are you mine?” 

“Yes.”  His finger slides over her and she stifles a scream.

“Are you sure?  You don’t sound very enthusiastic.” 

“ _Yes_.”  He slides back and forward some more till the scream isn’t stifled any longer.  “Please.  _Please_.  Stop teasing and make me come.”  He slides again, and again, and again until she’s got no words left and orgasm is building in her and she’s _right there_ and yet again he stops.  This time he extricates his finger and traces it up her body to her mouth.

“Suck, Beckett,” and he doesn’t have to ask twice as she makes love to his finger and tastes herself on it and when she’s finished he takes off the blindfold and moves right away from her and she’s left bereft and whimpering.  He looks darkly over her, flushed and swollen at lips and breasts and undoubtedly between her legs and the hot possession in his gaze (and something that she thinks she begins to understand behind it and _oh maybe he’s all in too_ ) really, really does it for her and she’d writhe if only she could move and he’s undoing one ankle and maybe he’s tired of this and _oh_ that wouldn’t be any fun at all but then he’s retying the scarf and repeating with the other ankle and _oh_ he’s only tired of closed and now she’s held wide open and when she tries she _still_ can’t move at all and she knows what’s next and sure enough he settles his shoulders comfortably close to the point of the vee of her legs and she’s even more excited now.


	60. I did it for love

He simply looks, for a moment, and she considers pleading with him, but that’s a losing game tonight because after she’d edged him and made him beg and made him admit he’s hers – just like he’s making her admit she’s his now – there is absolutely no chance that she’ll get her own way in anything.

“You’re so wet, all for me.”  He’s hoarse, now, all the smooth velvet gone.  This close, every word blows over her and makes her try to squirm.  “You’re all mine.”   He lowers his head and licks and she’s instantly, mindlessly, lost in what his insanely, insatiably talented mouth can do.  True to his word, he keeps her edged over and over again, till she’s long past screaming that she’s his, long past begging.  At some point he’d undone those wickedly provocative little red bows and used tongue and fingers inside her to leave her helpless, at some later point he’d unlaced the red ribbons and stripped her naked, at some still later point he’d stopped for just long enough to allow her to answer his only question: _Are you mine?_   To which the only possible answer is _Yes_ , with the unspoken follow-up of _for as long as we can possibly be together_.   And finally, when she’s sure that she can’t be brought down any more, he slides into her and moves in her and touches her just right and she’s screaming and then she really does see stars.  From the way Castle’s calling her name as he comes, she thinks he might too.

It takes a few minutes for either of them to recover, and for Castle to free her.  Then he pulls her into him in the accustomed fashion and holds her puddled across him.  She thinks she could get used to this.  Every day, for a very, very long time.  Lying exhausted, indeed gorged; held close and cosseted, Beckett decides that soon, just in a little longer to make sure that there’s no prospect that Castle will try to interfere in her life without being asked, in just that short while she can tell him her history, and why she doesn’t dare go back to her mother’s case.  She has no doubt that he will understand her reasoning, and comply.  Then there will be no secrets, no barriers, no hiding; from Castle, or from herself.  Then she can see whether they can be, together, the something more that she thinks is there.  She’s made her mind up at last.

_All in.  I’m going to go all in._

She lies over him like a blanket and pillows her head on his well-defined chest; protected here from her own demons in a way she’d only allow behind her own – or his – front door.  Protected in a way he’d only offer behind the door.  She holds him close and curls into his embrace; sure, and secure in her surety, that he won’t betray her trust.  She’s fallen, she finally realises, and fallen hard.  She summons a single drop of energy and manages to reach his mouth, kisses him with all the emotions she won’t, can’t quite yet, say.  She’ll say it after he knows the whole.  She has no doubts that he’ll never treat her as a victim; never regard her as in some way less; never believe that dominance in bed means dominance anywhere else; never stop her being first through the door.  _All mine_ , she thinks sleepily.  _All right, and all mine_. 

She wakes unusually slowly, unwilling to leave the warmth surrounding her.  When she finally opens her eyes, Castle’s leaning up on one elbow, smiling lazily down at her.

“Hey, sleepyhead.”

She means to growl at him, but somehow it emerges as a satisfied purr.  The slow, sleepy smile above her adds a measured dose of sensuality, as Castle’s other hand strokes down from her shoulder to her hipbone and back up again, long lazy swoops leaving her skin prickling in their wake.  She reaches up and drags his head down to her and takes slow, definitive possession of him, careful kisses and delicate, drugging touch; none of the clawing, frenetic passion of their heated, sweat-soaked, hard-fought night, no struggle for dominance or forced surrender.  It’s gentle, almost playful; mutual giving and receiving, no need to fight this time; soft fingertips not talon-sharp nails; light strokes not hard grip; slow and easy, not fast and rough; soft sighs instead of screaming.  And when they’re done, in soothing culmination, they’re closer than they’ve ever been, bodies and minds and emotions together.

She almost speaks then, decides not to break this perfect moment with murder.  When the case is complete and put away, all the loose ends tied up; she’ll speak.  She’ll take him to some quiet restaurant and talk, explain the whole history, not merely the panicked attempt to silence him just days ago, explain why she can’t ever go back down that rabbit-hole again.  He’ll understand, and leave it.

* * *

 

When she meets him, mid-day, Sorenson kicks and screams and objects, but eventually caves in to Beckett’s focused viciousness and agrees to get her (and Castle, though Beckett’s not stupid enough to say that until it’s too late for Sorenson to undo the meet) to see Jimmy the Rat Moran.  It’s all going great, for talking to a lowlife, until they tell him how the surgeon got dead and he spooks.  Complete washout.

Back in the precinct, while they’re trying to explain to Ryan and Espo how a key Federal witness now won’t testify, Montgomery comes out, grave expression on his face.  _Oh hell_ , thinks Beckett, _now I’m in for it._   But it’s not that.  It’s worse.  Moran and Sorenson got ambushed.  Moran’s basically okay.  Sorenson’s in surgery.  And definitely not okay.

Beckett hightails it to the hospital, Castle following.  She’s looked like she’s a ghost since Montgomery opened his mouth.  Castle recognises all the signs of guilt – unwarranted, perhaps, but he knows Beckett won’t grant herself absolution until Sorenson is clearly out of danger.  No matter what he says, how he tries to soothe her – no ability to touch her, with all her team bustling about them here in the waiting room – how much he tries to tell her it’s not her fault and she pushes so hard because she cares, she’s not having any of it.  She doesn’t relax for an instant, still trying to work out who, and how, could have followed her to the meet, still believing that it’s all her fault.  He can’t even comfort her, can’t wrap her into his embrace.  And to top it all off, he can’t stay.  He’s got to be home for Alexis: to be there when she finishes her first date and comes home.  (He doesn’t trust any 15-year old male near his daughter.  He knows what they’re like.  He was one, once.)  She won’t leave, even when Ryan comes out and tells her that Sorenson will be okay, even when they put him into a recovery room. 

“Go home, Castle,” Beckett says miserably.  “You gotta go home.  I’ll be fine. I just need to see that he’s come through, and I’ll go home.”  Castle looks at her sceptically.  She’s not fine at all, but it’s close on ten p.m. and he has to be back at the loft shortly.  He’s cutting it very close as it is, and Alexis leaves for camp tomorrow, early.

“Promise?”  She nods, reluctantly.

“Unless I get a break, or something pops.  I’m not going home if something pops.”

It’s Castle’s turn to nod, reluctantly, and leave.

Beckett slumps, disheartened, back on to one of the hard plastic chairs, waiting without any anticipation at all.  She truly despises what Sorenson had done, but she’d never, ever wanted him to be hurt.  Another wave of guilt flows in to drown her.  She sits, and waits, gets some appalling coffee, and waits, paces, and waits.  Time drags past.  She dozes, restlessly, unrefreshingly, on and off.  In the small hours, she’s still waiting, pacing, watching Sorenson’s still, sleeping form through the door.  She’s forgotten her promise, as she waits, repetitively running over everything she knows.  And suddenly something pops.

* * *

 

She goes straight to the precinct, to her murder board.  At six, she calls the boys in.  At nine, Castle arrives.  She’s strung so tight the sparks are jumping from her: fuelled up on concentrated caffeine, her hands almost shaking from the adrenaline/caffeine overload.

“Hey. Been reading on the internet about this new thing called _sleep_.  Supposed to be real good for you.”  All she does is shushes him.  And takes the coffee, and drains it without a pause.  She’s talking to herself, really.

“It wasn't anyone at the U.S. Attorney's office. They wouldn't need us to find him. So it had to be someone that we talked to.”  

It’s not the Mob.  It’s not the fiancée - Beckett had never thought that was a realistic possibility.  That only leaves the clinic staff. Beckett orders Ryan and Esposito to recheck all the staff.  The best bet is the new boy, only there a month.  She marches off to go back to the clinic.  Castle follows her, watching the adrenaline holding her up.   He doesn’t think she’s slept at all.  He doesn’t touch her in the elevator, or the garage, sure that if he breaks the mood she won’t be able to do what she feels she needs to do to solve this case.  He doesn’t talk, either, and nor does Beckett, wired up on desperation and guilt.  He’ll comfort her, soothe her, when it’s done.

At the clinic, the new boy’s bacon is only saved when Beckett’s phone rings, just as she’s about to haul him in, and Esposito tells her it’s the other nurse.  Identity theft, only discovered when he compared photos.  Nice work, Espo, Beckett thinks.  But then there’s a new urgency.  The fake nurse has the correct ID to get right into the hospital to Jimmy Moran’s bedside, and she’s on the approved list of visitors.  They gun it to the hospital.  Beckett’s got a plan, and they’re in good time to set it all up.  They don’t bother telling Jimmy about it, though.  His reactions need to be real.   Besides which, he’s a pretty bad guy himself.  A little fear won’t hurt him.

And… it all plays out perfectly.  Their fake nurse turns out to be a hitwoman, and just to put the icing on the cake she agrees to turn state’s evidence – and Moran agrees to testify too.  Maybe that’s gratitude for them saving his nasty life, though Beckett isn’t so sure.  Montgomery is delighted: everyone – even the US Attorney’s office – is happy.  Unusually, Castle hadn’t been there.  He’d taken a call just as they got back to the precinct and dashed off, claiming an urgent appointment that he’d forgotten.  He’d looked sufficiently stressed about it that Beckett hadn’t even asked what it was.

She smiles happily to herself.  Everything’s falling into place.  She’ll get all the paperwork finished tomorrow, and then she’ll persuade Castle out for dinner, (that won’t be difficult) and explain everything.  She’d hated the idea of him being around, in the beginning: it’s taken a while for her to get used to him, but together as partners they’re even more effective than she was alone.  Her solve rate is just as high – higher – and it’s more fun than it’s ever been.  He completes her team, in a way she’d never have anticipated.  He’s stopped her risking burnout.    In short, he makes her more.  And then there’s the _other_ feeling, the one that nestles warmly in her chest.

First, though, much as she doesn’t want to, she’d better go and thank Sorenson for his input, express her genuine sorrow that he was shot, and bid him farewell.  Out of her life, forever.  Then she can concentrate on trying for something she hasn’t had in years – a proper, serious, relationship with a man whom she is certain she can trust. 

If the boys could have seen her face now, which exceedingly luckily they cannot, they’d have been dividing up the pool.  Amazingly, Ryan would have won.  Well, actually he wouldn’t, because none of them could have won: the pool had begun too late.  But he – none of them – know that.

Montgomery’s perfectly happy to wave Beckett off to the hospital and forgive her the paperwork till tomorrow.  After all, she’s been in since four a.m., and even Beckett needs sleep.  Probably.  He notes with some considerable interest her unusually cheerful disposition.  About time, too.

* * *

 

Castle’s call had been from Clark Murray.  He wants to see Castle, with his findings.  There are, in fact, findings.  Castle is simultaneously delighted and terrified.  He’s found her something.  Whatever it is, it’s something.  Now all he needs to do is understand what it is, pass it on and explain that he hadn’t broken her boundaries because he’d asked Clark weeks and weeks ago, and he hasn’t done anything else with the information except pass it on and let her decide what to do.  _Let her?_   No.  He doesn’t _let her_ do anything (well, outside bed).  Pass it on and then it’s up to her.  But he hopes she’ll let him help her solve it, this time.

Clark is definitive.  It was a professional hit.  Targeted.  And one of five.  Related.  Beckett absolutely has to know this.  But it will hurt.  It’ll really hurt her.  But, again, it’s the good kind of pain – the kind that heals, rather than leaving the wounds wide open.  It’ll be fine.  It will.  But now that the moment is upon him, he’s not at all certain that it will be.  Just to improve the shining hour, his mother walks in as soon as Clark walks out, and she’s obviously been eavesdropping again.  Well, he’s decided what to do.  He’s known all week what he has to do.  Even if this backfires spectacularly (but it _won’t_ , it _won’t_ ) he has to tell her what’s been found.  He can’t, couldn’t, face himself if he ducked it.  So he has no compunction at all about lying to his mother and letting her think that she’s persuaded him.

* * *

 

When Castle gets to the hospital, he can hear Beckett laughing with Sorenson.  All his possessive jealousy springs up.  She’d felt guilty that Sorenson got shot, and she’d come to see him out of guilt, and he’d thought she despised that Federal poster-boy – and now she’s laughing with him?  Surely her guilt hasn’t brought her back to liking him? 

He doesn’t hear the false note in Beckett’s laugh, can’t see the strain in her knotted hands and shoulders from outside.  He can’t tell she’s acting, making Sorenson believe that they’re even: no-one owes anyone anything.  All he knows is that _his_ Beckett is having a pleasant time with another man, who Castle is sure will do nearly anything to try to get her back.  Well.  He’s not having her.  In a few moments she’ll be so pleased with him, Castle, that she won’t be thinking about anyone else at all.

He sits down on one of the hard hospital chairs and clings to that thought as he listens to the crisp flick-flack of law-enforcement banter and tries to batter down his unworthy feelings.  The man may be a complete douche, but he’s been shot in the line and he’d done the right thing for Beckett’s case.  He, Castle, doesn’t need to be jealous of Sorenson.  It’s Castle who’s ended up with Beckett, not Sorenson.  All he needs to remember is that Beckett’s with him, not Sorenson.   She’d never cheat, she’d never do anything underhand.  If she’d wanted Sorenson she’d have ditched him (a pang spikes in his chest) and gone with Sorenson.  _Integrity, thy name is Beckett_. 

In another few moments, all his integrity will be fully restored, too.  He’ll tell her what he’s found and explain that he’d started it all before she’d asked him not to, and apologise as much as she wants for doing that.  But – he cuddles to him his happiness that he’s been able to bring her something and lets that wash away the jealousy in one swift stream – he’s found something for her, and he’ll have made her happy, and taken some of the pain away.  And then they can take it all away, together.

He hears the sounds of conversation closing and looks round the door into the room.  Sorenson, shot or not, is still his previous, dislikeable, self.

“It's the writer monkey. What is he still doing here? Haven't you finished your book yet?”  Castle rises above it.

“Last chapter.”  Well, nearly.  Home straight, at least.  He looks at Beckett.  “Do you have a sec?”

“Yeah.”  Actually, she looks surprisingly pleased to have an excuse.  Maybe she wasn’t enjoying Sorenson’s company after all. 

“You look awfully serious. Is everything okay?”  Beckett says.  Now he’s come to the point, he’s not quite sure where to start.

“Take a seat.”  She’ll need to be sitting down, for this.  But she’ll be pleased, and happy, in just a moment.

“What?”  Beckett looks adorably confused. 

“Sit down,” he entices.  She does, and he moves closer.  No-one else needs to hear the discussion.

“Castle, what's going on?”  Now she’s getting suspicious.  _Get on with it, Rick_.  He shakes off his momentary curl of trepidation and dives right in.

“It’s about your mother,” he says, seriously.  He doesn’t notice her freeze.  “I asked a friend who’s a pathologist to take a look at the photos of the wounds, and he found something.”

“You did what?”  That doesn’t sound like she’s happy.  Still, when it sinks in she’ll cheer up.  All she wants is to solve cases, and here’s something that will help her solve the most important one in her life.

“He _found_ something, Beckett.  Something that’ll help you find your mother’s killer.  You can reopen her case and solve it.”   He really doesn’t understand at all why she still isn’t smiling.  In fact, she’s gone absolutely corpse-white.  The magnitude of his mistake is still dawning on him as she starts to speak.

“What have you done?  What right had you to interfere?  I told you not to.  One thing, Castle, and you couldn’t do it.  Get out.”  She can’t believe it.  She really cannot believe this.  It’s all crashed down around her.  She’s lost everything she’d thought they had in four short words.  He’s as untrustworthy as Sorenson.

She stands up again as he takes a step towards her. 

“I wanted to help.”

“No.  You wanted to interfere.  You thought I needed fixed.  Needed help.  Did it occur to you I fixed myself?  That I didn’t want your help?  I trusted you.  I thought you wouldn’t try to take care of me.  I didn’t need that.  I didn’t need someone else deciding what was best for me.”  She pauses.

“What gave you the right to decide on what’s best for me?  Didn’t you think I was capable of my own decisions?  Poor pathetic Beckett, can’t manage her own life without you to help?”  She stops again.

“You didn’t trust me to manage my own life.  You thought you could do it better.”  She takes a harsh, scratching breath, and suddenly he sees everything about to collapse around him.

“I trusted you and I was wrong.”


	61. The producer of your nightmare

Horror is dawning in her eyes, withdrawal in every line of her posture.  She’s taken two steps back from him, and as he moves toward her she steps back again, as if something’s – he’s - frightened her.  She’s not afraid of anything, he’d thought.  He’s never scared her, nothing’s ever intimidated or scared her, not Sorenson, not even the night he so nearly became that other man.  But s _he stepped back_.  He realises that he’s just destroyed something he barely knew he had, and a knife slices sharply into him.

“Kate, _please_ listen.” Every last vestige of emotion drains from her face, leaving it utterly blank.  Her eyes are cold and dead.

“I never told you my name.  How long have you known my name and not told me that you did, Castle?  Is that how long you’ve been betraying my trust: as long as you’ve kept that a secret?”  It had become – he had thought - a shared joke, that he’d played along with.  Now it’s another knife through his chest, because clearly it hadn’t been a joke to her.  It had just been another way of keeping him at a distance.  She takes an agonised breath.  He watches, appalled, as she takes the leap of understanding.  “You would have told me, if you’d found out honestly.  You’d never have kept on playing the game.  You couldn’t tell me you knew it because you found out by reading the file.” 

“I _trusted_ you.” It’s the soul-searing pain of a small child, finding out far too soon that Santa is just another adult lie.  He’s never heard such horrified, tortured hurt.  What has he done?  What the hell has he done?

“How can I trust you in anything if you couldn’t do this?  I told you not to go messing in my past.  In my mother’s case.  You promised not to.  You couldn’t keep that promise.  So I can’t trust you.  Don’t come near me again.  We’re done.”  She’s not saying – but he hears it anyway – _If I can’t trust you in one thing I can’t trust you in anything_ – _so_ _I don’t trust you at all.  I don’t trust you with me._

“I thought I could trust you,” she says, so quietly he’s sure he shouldn’t have heard it.  It falls with the finality of a guillotine.  She isn’t even angry.  It would be understandable if she were angry, furious, blazing with that incandescent rage he’s seen before, or drowning in hopeless misery...  But no.  She’s just…completely shut down.

“I didn’t promise you I wouldn’t,” he cries, and knows it’s useless even as he says it.  “I didn’t ever promise.  I’d started long before you asked me not to.  I keep my promises.  You can trust me.” 

But it’s falling on deaf ears, and she’s walking away, shoulders rigid, neck and back upright, not looking back.  How did it all go so wrong, so fast?  No-one’s ever walked away from him, before, since he became a success.  No-one else has ever called him out on his behaviour, and then not forgiven him instantly.  _She’s_ never not forgiven him before, never not listened to his explanation.  This relationship is just full of firsts. 

Except it doesn’t look like it’s a relationship any more.  It looks like _I don’t want you._ It looks fundamentally like _goodbye, don’t call, don’t write, don’t come around._

It looks like he’s been ditched.  That’s another first, since he became a success.  Goes along with the searing pain in his chest.

* * *

 

Beckett goes home to her apartment, shuts the door on the unforgiving world, and resorts to self-medication with a stiff drink.  Well, that’s that.  All the games they’d played were simply games, nothing more.  She’d misread it, and misread him.  Another complete failure of her attempts at a proper relationship.  She should never have believed it was possible.  She should never have trusted him.  She doesn’t, ever, stay with men she can’t trust.  She may only paddle in the shallow end of the pool, may not be looking for a relationship, but she still needs to have absolute trust in her partner.  And she doesn’t see how she can have that with him, any more.  Even if he’d never promised anything, he knew that she’d never accept what he’s done.  He must have known.  Admitting his actions was just a way to finish with her, without him having to say it himself.  Not bad going, Castle.  How to leave your lover without even leaving yourself.  Make them do it all themselves.  Very clever, Writer-Boy.  Very clever indeed.  She wonders bitterly how often he’s used that trick, in his life and in his books.  She dabs at her eyes, again.

She skips dinner in favour of a second glass of whiskey, and runs herself a bath.  She never has more than two whiskeys, when she’s alone.  It would be all too easy to have another, and then another, and then keep going.  She knows that story.  It only has one, disastrous, ending.  Bit like her love life, really.  She sniffs, and slides into the bath.  Small circles form on the surface of the water.

Her phone is beeping, singing the song of messages, all the time she’s bathing, letting the warm water and soft oils try to soothe away the pain.  It had only been sex, after all.  Love had nothing to do with it.  And sex can be substituted.  She knows that.  Back to her dreams, and if for a while she needs more, there are always toys.  And tomorrow in the precinct – if he turns up, though she can’t see why he would - she’ll send him off with Ryan, and she’ll pair with Esposito if she needs someone with her.  She’s worked without a partner for years.  A few weeks of having someone else with her won’t make any difference to her usual methods.  It’ll all be back to just the way it used to be, in just a short while.  She tells herself that it’s what she wants, and ignores her phone, and her agonising pain, and the continued trickling down her cheeks.

When she steps out the bath, though, professionalism forces her to check the messages and texts.  She can’t afford to ignore the phone: bodies drop at any hour and so she never leaves it on silent at night.  All the messages and texts are from Castle.  All of them are trying to apologise, to convince her that she can trust him.  She deletes them all.  It’s just as well she kept her foot out the door.  It’s just as well she didn’t want a relationship: it’s just as well she hadn’t taken those final steps.  It’s just as well she hadn’t fallen in love. And if she keeps telling herself all those comforting lies, maybe this won’t hurt her quite as much, tomorrow.

Maybe she’ll be able to believe those lies, tomorrow.

* * *

 

Castle has gone home, devastated.  She’d looked at him as if he were that other man, the one who would use power and wealth to do what he wanted with nobody to stop him, no conscience.  The one who would take whatever he liked, from whomever he liked, heedless, and worse uncaring, of the destruction he left behind him. 

He’d promised himself he’d never be that other man.  He isn’t that other man.   And yet… Beckett walked away from him, because she thinks he is.  Thinks he can’t be trusted; that he’s just another destructive element that she doesn’t need in her life; that he’s ignored what she wants to do what he likes. 

It’s all backfired so badly.  Okay, he’d started out intending to prove that he could solve the case, show her that he was enough to match her, show her she should want him, but even then, even if he hadn’t admitted it to himself till much later, part of it had been to take away her pain, take care of her, protect her.  And now, instead of bringing her closer, he’s driven her away; and surely he should have realised earlier that there was far more to what he was doing than he let himself see?

Alone in his study, the twilight draws in around Castle as he tries to understand why it’s all gone so terribly wrong; why it hurts so much.  He’d thought this was just another affair; better than all the rest, but still just a long-term relationship that would, eventually, come to an end.  He’d thought that he was in control, still had his feet on the ground.  He’d thought that even though she’d told him not to meddle, far too late because he’d begun long before, that he could show her success and she’d forgive him. 

He’d thought a lot of things, and not one of them has proved to be correct.

He taps out another message.  She hasn’t answered a single one, but he has to try.  He stopped counting, after the fifth. 

Maybe he should try thinking honestly about what he’s been doing: what he thinks, and what Beckett sees.  He doesn’t know which might be easier: he’s sure that both will be agonising.  But to fix this self-inflicted fuck-up, he’s going to have to deal with both.

Start there.  Why does he want to fix this?  They’ve had their blazing affair, so what need for playboy Richard Castle to go chasing after a woman who doesn’t want him?  He’s had what he wanted, hasn’t he?

And there, right there, is the whole issue.  He hasn’t got what he wanted.  He hasn’t got anything of what he wanted.  Beckett doesn’t open up to him, doesn’t tell him anything, doesn’t share her life.  Sure, she shares – _shared.  Shared, Rick, past tense_ \- her body and bed, but she won’t come closer, won’t take down her barriers.  She never really has given him her full trust.  He dwells on the exceedingly painful realisation that he wanted Beckett to trust him properly, talk to him, like lovers do.  Oh.  Oh.  Somewhere along the way, without him even realising it, he’s fallen hard.  In fact, he’s fallen hard in love.  What a time to realise that, when he’s just been ditched. 

He thinks back, blades biting deeper with every instant, through all their interactions, (what a pathetically inadequate word) finally looking at his own behaviour without the shrouding film of self-deception.   Truthfully, he’d been falling since the very first day as a consultant.  He’d moved without noticing it from wanting a one-night stand to wanting an affair to wanting a relationship to… wanting her for ever.  He started wanting to take care of her – well, almost the first time he slept with her he’d not wanted to let her go; he should have known there was far more to this when he was so hurt that she’d regarded it as one night only; when he’d decided that she didn’t get to leave him – _and how’s that worked out for you, Rick?_ – when he’d started out unusually possessive and only got more so – _and that didn’t work out so well either, did it?_ – and then when he’d started to look into her story.

Esposito’d had the right of it, hadn’t he?  That memory comes scything back.  _I don’t believe your reasons, man.  Even if you do._   Even Esposito had seen more than he had.

It doesn’t really matter what Beckett saw, does it?  Because whatever she saw was a lie, because he’s systematically lied to himself all the way along.  How on earth could she have seen the truth, when he didn’t?  She thought he was out for a time-limited affair, because that’s what he’d told himself, even when he knew he wanted a relationship he’d still told himself it wouldn’t be forever.  He’d pushed away any other thoughts, because he was – oh.  Because he was too scared to look at them.  Because it might have meant he had to look at his own flaws and insecurities.  Because he might have had to take a risk with his own feelings, put them out there and risk rejection.

So why’d he really wanted to look into her story?  Why’d he wanted to take away her pain, protect her?  The last thing she needs is protection: tough-cop Beckett doesn’t need protection from anything; she’s perfectly capable of protecting herself from everything.  Up to and including her own feelings.  Tough-cop Beckett protects herself so well that she doesn’t let anyone in, doesn’t let anyone give her anything, doesn’t have a life.  She’s locked herself away so she never gets hurt again.  He’d known that.  He’d just thought that he could overcome it.  Park that, for a moment. 

Why had he interfered?  Why did he need to fix it?  He stares blindly out the window, not seeing the gathering darkness and the dull orange glow of sodium lights.  Because, he realises very slowly, because he always fixes things; stops it hurting.  For his mother, for his daughter, for his friends, few as real friends have been.  Catch that thought.  He fixes things, because that’s who he is, under the playboy public persona.  He’d fixed Meredith’s problems, by marrying her when being pregnant hurt her, divorcing her when it seemed that her being with him hurt him more, and taking custody, because being with Meredith would have hurt his baby Alexis.  He’d fixed his mother’s hurt, when she’d been ditched and ripped off – he’d fixed that abuse.  (He’ll never tell her that he’d tracked that man down.  They’d had an… interesting… discussion.  He’s not been seen in New York since.)  But he can’t fix the abuse that Beckett suffered.

He stops, suddenly.  Why’s the word _abuse_ coming up in his thoughts?  Beckett wasn’t abused.  Well, not in the usual meaning.  Though her mother’s murder was a violation.  And his dreams… nightmares… surely they were only imagination?  Weren’t they?  There’s a pattern, a story, forming at the edges of his mind.  _Think, Rick.  What’s going on here? Why do you want to take care of everyone?_   He leans back and closes his eyes, moving back into the past he’d so carefully, deliberately, forgotten: buried long since.

It hadn’t exactly been an easy life. Well, there’s an understatement.  Theatre life is never easy, and second-rate shows in a succession of hick towns makes it harder than in the city.  Add the trials of single parenthood, which he came to appreciate later on – and whilst he could apply an immense amount of money to solve most problems, and was able to arrange his work around Alexis, those weren’t solutions open to his mother.  So, start with the hand-to-mouth existence that a severe shortage of funds brings.  Looking back now, she’d made sure he never went short of food, or clothes, or schooling.  He’s not nearly so sure that her own needs for any of those were met.  So now they are, and however much he jokes with her about spending all his money he’d give her anything she wanted, and does, to make up for all the times that she sacrificed her needs to his.  But that’s unpleasant, but not abuse.

Move on.  How do you keep working, in an inherently unstable sector?  Well, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know, isn’t it?  Your reputation precedes you.  If you’re  - difficult – you don’t get work.  No work equals no pay equals no food.  So you can’t be difficult.  Define difficult.  A diva?  Maybe, maybe not.  A certain amount of histrionic behaviour goes with the territory.  Un-co-operative – that’s more likely.  If you’re not a team player, you’re not going to be working very much at all.  And the directors, and the stars (such as they might be when you’re touring Hicksville, Wisconsin) decide who’s a team player, and who isn’t, and spread the word.

He remembers, as a small boy, his mother telling him to sit in the wings and keep out the way, not to cause any difficulties, not to distract her or anyone else.   Keep out the way quietly and read.  In this new light, that was one way of making sure she was seen as co-operative, didn’t bring trouble with her in the shape of a small boy.  He’d resented it, without realising, for years; acted out at schools to show that he was worth noticing.  Still is acting out, in fact: celebrity Rick Castle, page six darling, man-about-town.  Always yelling _Look at me!_   He winces.  It occurs to him that he’d started by doing precisely that with Beckett, a woman for whom _buttoned-up_ is only the start of her infinite public reserve.  Looking into her mother’s case was just another way of making her pay attention: so she thinks.  She’s wrong, now, but he doesn’t know how to say that and make her believe the truth.

He remembers, too, his mother’s biting tension in certain theatres, with certain directors, or leading men.  He’d seen a lot of that, and now he thinks he finally knows why.  It’s not exactly unknown for influential people – and they were mostly men – to misuse it.  In an odd sort of way, having him around some of the more… forceful… influencers was protection.  Small children are not known for their discretion, and a few truthful comments to teachers or similar could be uncomfortable.  Better not to go there. 

Better, in fact, to pick on someone with no protection at all.

It wasn’t a dream.  It really happened.  He doesn’t remember where, or when, though he couldn’t have been older than ten.  He’d been sent off to read quietly while his mother was doing a placing rehearsal, and somehow he’d found a comfortable corner in among the stage flats and settled in.  He’d been jerked out of the world he was lost in by harsh tones, and one of the younger women trying to defend herself.  With adult hindsight, the big man of his nightmares was essentially pointing out that if she didn’t sleep with him, she wouldn’t be hired, backed up by unwanted kisses and mauling.  Now, you’d call it sexual harassment, damn close to rape.  Which it probably was, later.  The girl had left, crying, he remembers.  He hadn’t been spotted, though it had been a very close-run thing.

He must have been nine or ten, because he’d known that it was wrong.  His mother had been extremely careful to ensure that he knew about stranger danger, and more careful still that he knew the limits of permissible contact, even from people he knew, even in the intensely tactile, emotional theatre world.  So he’d gone to tell his mother, which would have been fine, if he hadn’t told her the instant that rehearsal was finished, in front of half the cast and the man in question.  To say it hadn’t gone well would be roughly equivalent to saying that the Great Depression was a little bothersome.  He’d been roundly shouted down, and in the end had given in, said he’d made up the story, apologised.  It hadn’t ended there, though.  Later on, he’d had to sit through that man tearing into his mother, making it clear that any repetition would mean she’d never work north of the Mason-Dixon line again.  She’d cried, almost silently, for most of the night, and told him it was nightmares the next morning.  He’d known she was lying.  And he never mentioned any of it, or anything similar, ever again.  He’d never mentioned the girls exiting the producers’ rooms, dishevelled; the sounds of crying from other rooms in thin-walled motels in small dirty towns; the traces of white powder in dressing rooms, the occasional syringe, or smell of burning and hot foil.  He’d seen it all, and hadn’t been able to stop any of it.

Later, when he’d blazed across the celebrity firmament, he’d seen it all again.  Booze and dope, hard drugs and no choices, mostly wannabe women (but some men) making choices which were no choices at all.  He’d heard them, begging for a fix; begging for a job or a break or the money they needed.  He’d lived in that world, for a few months, until he’d realised that he could do drugs, or he could write, but not both.  No Hunter S Thompson he.  So he’d turned his will on stepping away from looming addiction and he’d won.  So many others had lost, couldn’t be saved or helped or protected.  They say you have to want to help yourself, but Castle’s never quite managed to internalise that.

He’d failed.  Failed to protect his mother, failed to protect the ingénue, or anyone else.  Though how should he have succeeded, age ten, or even twenty?  But he’s spent the rest of his life never failing at anything, trying to make sure that the people he cares for are protected; and that he never, ever, takes anything that the other person isn’t willing and happy to give.  He isn’t ever that other man.  Those other men.

Except this time it hasn’t worked. 

For the first time ever the two principles he’s unknowingly lived by have come into conflict, and the net result has been disaster.  Trying – unwittingly –  to protect Beckett from the damage she’s causing herself by not solving her mother’s case, by shutting everyone out, trying to make her pain better, has meant that he’s taken something – her privacy, her history, even her first name – that she wasn’t willing to give.  Which, in fact, she’s spent three months deliberately not giving, except for short minutes, on occasional evenings, which it’s clear, in the blazing Klieg lights of hindsight, she regarded as huge mistakes and never mentioned again.

Three months, and she was no closer emotionally than she was after three weeks, or three days, or three minutes.  And as of three hours ago, she’s as far apart as she could get without one of them leaving the country, and it’s all his own fault.  All of it is his own fault.  It’s not even as if she’s deceived him: she made it perfectly clear she didn’t want someone to take care of her, she didn’t want a relationship.  She said so, and he didn’t even try to argue with her.  He thought she’d change her mind: he thought she would let him in.  He’d thought that she _had_ begun to let him in.  And if she didn’t do so because of proximity, she’d do it because he’d have helped her to solve her case and made her happy.

He’d wanted, at first, to possess her, to keep her.  Now he wants to show her he loves her.  Instead all he’s got is a handful of nothing.

 


	62. Now you're just somebody that I used to know

He goes to the precinct the very next day, hoping that he can find some way to talk to Beckett.  He’s brought her the usual coffee and bear claw.  When he puts it down, for a moment he thinks she’s going to throw it in the trash.  That would have been bad enough, but she doesn’t.  What she does is far, far worse.

“Thank you, Mr Castle.”  _Mr Castle?_   The glacier chill in her bored voice sweeps over him.  “Very kind of you.  However, it’s not necessary.  Please don’t bother yourself again.”  And with that she glances at him with unemotional eyes, ignores his gasp, and then summons Ryan over.

He can’t believe it.  Coffee’s become their thing: he brings it, she smiles, and takes it, no matter how tired or tense or angry she might otherwise be.  And now she doesn’t want it.  She doesn’t want him.  She really meant every word of dismissal she’d said, last evening.  He’d hoped that there would be a little softening: a night’s sleep might have given her a fresh perspective, given him the tiny opening that would provide a chance to explain why he did it.  But she’s talking to Ryan with that same _don’t care_ tone that she uses on liars and murderers when she’s telling them their fate.  He looks down and away, and notices an empty takeout coffee cup already in the trashcan.  She’d bought her own coffee, this morning.  She hadn’t waited for him to bring it.  His throat closes.

“Ryan, you take Mr Castle.”  Ryan’s astonished gaze flicks up at the formal description and the cold, neutral tone.  “Espo, you’re with me.”  It’s like being back at the beginning again, but this time it’s worse, because there is no spark, no temper, no electric connection.  No anger, no misery.  She doesn’t care, everything she might have felt is all dead – and he killed it.  She catches killers, but she won’t be hunting him down.  It’s quite possibly the first murder in her entire career that she doesn’t feel any need to solve. 

“C’mon, Castle.  We got cab drivers to find.”  Ryan steers him out the bullpen.  Castle lets him, unsure whether his feet would take him away if Ryan wasn’t pushing him.  They get at least five feet out the door before Ryan turns to him.

“Spill.”

“What?  Nothing to tell.”

“Yeah, right.  Yesterday you were Beckett’s partner.  First partner – official or unofficial - she’s had that I remember.  Today you’re _Mister_ Castle and she doesn’t wanna know you.  What’s up?”  Ryan isn’t – yet – using an interrogation cadence, but Castle gets the clear impression it’s not far away.

“Nothing to tell, Ryan.  Beckett never liked me, and now she’s back to showing it.  She never wanted a partner, she never wanted me shadowing her, and now that Federal ex-boyfriend of hers has been shot she’s got a new excuse to show it.”

Ryan looks sceptical.  “Really, man?  You really expect me to believe that?  What sort of a cop d’you think I am?  I met better liars than you every day of the week in Narcotics.”  So that’s where Ryan started out.  And then he carries on, to Castle’s astounded disbelief.  “If you don’t tell me an’ Espo the truth we can’t even try to help you sort this fuck-up out.  You don’t have to tell me now.  But tonight we’re going to that bar you like and you are going to keep buying the drinks until you tell us everything.”

He’s four steps down the street before he realises that Castle hasn’t moved.  “Move your ass, Castle.  We got a job to do.  C’mon, shift.”

Castle takes three long strides.  “Why’re you doing this?  Beckett runs your team.  She’s your boss and a cop like you.  I just follow you all around for the books.”  It’s Ryan’s turn to stop dead.

“You’re part of the team too.  You think we haven’t noticed that our solve rate is the best in Homicide, and it’s only got better in the three months since you came by?  If Beckett flames out it’ll all go to shit.  And she will, if she hasn’t got something to keep her grounded.  Like it or not, Writer-Boy, that looks like you.  So we’re gonna help you fix it, because we’re not gonna watch Beckett crash and burn.”

There’s a pause, while Castle processes that.  He can’t decide how he feels about it.  He was delighted to be included as part of the team, yesterday, and the weeks before that.  He’s not so delighted to be regarded as such simply because the boys think he’s some sort of a stabiliser, like training wheels on a child’s first bicycle.  That has a disturbingly temporary implication about it.

“She’s” – no need for Ryan to specify who _she_ is, in this context – “only ever one step away from going over the edge.  Don’t think that’s ever going to change.  Someone’ll always need to be a safety line to keep her out it.  Looks like that oughta be you.  Prob’ly not a good idea to tell her so, though.  Just - keep showing up, Castle.  She’s gonna need you.”

* * *

 

Back in the bullpen, Beckett is discussing money trails and phone records with Esposito, putting up the old case they’ve gone back to on her murder board, wiped clean of any reminders of yesterday.  It’s so normal – so pre-Castle normal, Esposito thinks, that it’s screaming falsity.  Beckett’s behaving  as if she’d never met Castle; as if he’d never entered the precinct.  Espo, who’s a damn good cop, isn’t fooled.  There’s been more going on there than he and Ryan have been privy to.  A whole lot more.  Being a sensible man, though, he doesn’t call Beckett out on any of it: the undrunk coffee that Castle left on her desk, the untouched bear claw.  He doesn’t emit a single word of surprise when she goes to the gym at lunch time, because after all she might have had lunch without him noticing, though it’s not very likely.  He certainly doesn’t mention that Ryan’s texted him with arrangements for the evening involving beer, bars and Castle.

And he doesn’t say anything more than _Goodnight_ at the end of his shift when he departs for the Old Haunt and leaves Beckett in the quietening bullpen, staring at her murder board, in just the way she always does.  Because none of that is any different at all from the way it was yesterday, or the day before, or the day before that, or three months ago.  Except that today Beckett hasn’t smiled, or laughed, or bantered, once.

On her own at last, Beckett lets her poise fail and her shoulders slump, but keeps her focus firmly on the case file on her desk and the murder board beside her.  She can’t afford to do otherwise.  She can’t afford to fall into the pit again.

But he’s found something.  He’s found something that the original investigators hadn’t.  He’s found something that she couldn’t, and it claws at her.  It clawed at her all night, has scratched at her all day, and under her focus on the instant case she’s raw and bleeding from it.  A couple of floors below her are the archives, and the file.  All she has to do is take the elevator. 

It’s all she’d have to do.

* * *

 

Ryan’s successfully kept Castle out the precinct all day, on one pretext or another.  It’s been like trailing his own personal storm cloud: Castle’s barely said two words, just loomed behind him and terrorised every potential witness with thoroughly intimidating silence and an expression that hissed _do you feel lucky, punk?_   with every word that Ryan said.  He’s never had such co-operative witnesses in all his career.  He’d rather have smooth Castle back, though.  He doesn’t like the feeling that the man lurking behind him needs only one very small thing to go wrong before he snaps, messily.  He really hopes that Castle doesn’t carry concealed.

He’s massively relieved when he realises that shift finished half an hour ago and they can legitimately stop interviewing witnesses and make their way to the Old Haunt to meet Espo.  Ryan thinks he needs a beer or two.  Screw that.  He _knows_ he needs a beer or two.  Or six.  He’d thought the tension in the bullpen was bad when Beckett and Castle were ... um.... okay.  For a given value of okay.  He’d had no idea. 

For all his brave words to Castle about helping him fix this fucked-up mess – and Ryan is perfectly sure that it’s a far bigger mess than either Beckett or Castle has let on, because he is also perfectly sure that there is far more between them than he and Espo were aware of – Ryan has absolutely no idea where to start.  Men, after all, and especially cops, don’t talk about feelings.  At least not before the whiskey bottle’s run dry.

The Old Haunt is not busy, and in Castle’s miserably jaundiced mood he can detect a number of small signs that indicate that it is not being run nearly as well as it could be: the lighting’s dingy, the paint is peeling, the table isn’t particularly clean.  Still, it’s a bar, it has whiskey and if he has enough alcohol then maybe he can blot out the needle-sharp picture of Beckett’s indifferent face, disposing of him with as much care or attention as if he were a used Kleenex.  Less, in fact.  She’d at least have made sure the Kleenex had reached its intended destination safely.

The first double doesn’t even touch the sides.  Espo expertly takes possession of Castle’s wallet, refrains from any comment – now is _not_ the time to rag Castle, who’s as primed to blow as a grenade with the pin already out – on the assortment of black and platinum cards, selects one, and has a low-voiced but emphatic conversation with the bartender, punctuated by taps on his badge.

The second glass is emptied before Ryan and Esposito, no slow drinkers themselves, have drained their first beers.  As instructed, the bartender puts another whiskey down.  This time Castle simply wraps his large hands around it and stares into the glass as if it might give him some answers.  No-one’s said a word since they sat down.  Which does not mean that Espo and Ryan haven’t been communicating extensively with each other, by means of raised brows, sharply directed glances, and small movements of heads and hands.  Their silent conversation is currently discussing where to start.  Esposito takes point.

“So, Castle.  You ‘n’ Beckett.”  Castle stares bleakly across the table, returns to contemplation of the whiskey.

“There is no me and Beckett.  Didn’t you detect that, Detectives?”  The acid in his tone would dissolve mountains.  He takes a large gulp of his drink.

“What’cha do?”  It’s Ryan’s turn.  “Yesterday you were partners.”  Castle downs the dregs of the third whiskey rather than answer that.

“Okay then.”  Esposito picks up the ball again.  “We’ll tell you what we think’s happened.  Either you ditched her” – Castle gives one short head shake of negation.  Ryan clocks the inadvertent confession and parks it for later – “or you messed in one of her…”  Espo’s words slow down as he sees the open road unrolling in front of him “…cases.  Aw, _shit_ , Castle.  You didn’t, didya?  Tell me you didn’t.  _Say it ain’t so, Joe_.”  Ryan raises questioning eyebrows.  Esposito turns to him.  “Our resident jackass here went messing in Beckett’s mother’s case.”  Ryan’s jaw drops open.

“You did _what_?”

“What the hell d’ya do that for.  You musta known that would be a short route to complete fucking disaster.  Thought you were intelligent, Castle.  How d’ya not notice that she” – again, _she_ needs no further specification – “never talks about it.  I told you” – Ryan draws in a shocked breath at that – “that she had to be hauled back from it last time.  She hasn’t touched it since.  An’ now you’ve ripped it all open again.  You fucking _idiot_.”  The last word carries more fury than any of the expletives Esposito could have used. 

Castle finally looks up.  “I found something.” 

His words lie corpse-like on the slab of table between them.  For a long moment no-one says anything at all.  Another whiskey arrives, and more beers.

“You found something.  You?”  Esposito’s utterly disbelieving.  “You found something Beckett couldn’t?”

“Yeah.”  That falls heavy, too.  “I got a contact.”  Another drink.  The memory of Beckett’s white, appalled, ghastly face in the hospital hasn’t blurred at all, yet.  “Pathologist.  Best in New York.  So I got him to take a look at the autopsy report and the photos.”  Espo and Ryan exchange glances.  “And he found something.”  Another slug.  He hasn’t looked at the detectives once since he’d first said he found something.

“So I told her I’d found something.”  He stares straight at Esposito, devastated incomprehension all over his face.  “I thought she’d be pleased.”  He stops.  There’s nothing more to say.  All of them know just how not-pleased Beckett had been.  The fourth whiskey hits his stomach.  So far none of them have had the slightest effect.  Everything is still just as cuttingly sharp as the moment it happened.

“What’d he find?”  Castle doesn’t answer immediately.

“I never got the chance to tell her what.  She just...”  He stops, again, changes course.  “The stab wounds.  The first one killed her.  The rest were just a cover-up.  It was a professional hit.”  Pause again.  “She wouldn’t listen to me.”

Ryan and Esposito exchange more glances.  Fixing this is going to take a lot more effort than anything they’d envisaged.  Time to move this conversation on.  “No wonder she never found anything.”

There’s another long, funereal silence as Castle turns all his focus on to consuming more whiskey.  When Ryan thinks that Castle’s gaze is starting to lose precision, he begins down the real track.

“What’s the deal with you ‘n’ Beckett, Castle?”

“No deal.  She doesn’t want a relationship.  She never did.”  He’s not nearly sober enough, now, either to watch his words or care that he isn’t.  “She doesn’t want a partner any more, either.”  Both detectives hear quite clearly what he’s not saying.  _She doesn’t want me._   “She never let me in.  I wanted her to let me in.”  He’s slurring his speech more and more with each word.

“So what d’ya want now?  Can’t help you fix it if you dunno what you want.”  Castle’s gaze is almost completely unfocused.  All the excessive consumption of whiskey has hit at once.  He’s barely aware of what he’s saying.

“I want my Beckett back.”

Esposito summons the bartender and the check, which Castle’s just about capable of signing.  Ryan stays in the booth, while Espo wrestles Castle out the door and into a cab home.  He returns a few minutes later.

“He’s gonna suffer in the morning.”  Ryan nods, almost sympathetically.

“Oh yeah.”  They trade looks of fellow-feeling.  It’s not as if they’ve never drowned their sorrows themselves.

“You know,” Ryan says slowly, “for all Castle talks all the time, he never really says anything, does he?”  Esposito considers that, and remembers the previous discussion he’d had with Castle.  He’d not said anything significant at all.  In fact, he, Esposito, had given away considerably more information than Castle had.  He’d guessed that there was more to it than simply Castle’s desire to find the end of  the story, sure, but thinking back Castle hadn’t said squat.

“Naw.  He’s never said anything much.  Fact is, he’s said less about his life than Beckett has, an’ I thought that was impossible.  He’s not the goofball he makes out, though.  Had a chat with him a few weeks back, when he said Beckett’d told him ‘bout her mom.  Tried to stare him down.  Didn’t work.  There’s more to him than he lets on.”  Ryan nods.

“Saw that today.  He frightened all my witnesses.  Never got so much info as I did today.  Lowlives fell over themselves to talk.”

“He’d be good for her, then.  Wouldn’t leave her, wouldn’t take any shit.  He might even keep her out the rabbit hole.”

“Yeah, sure.  If he hadn’t fucked that up by pushing her in already.  I don’t see how he’s gonna talk his way outta this snafu in a hurry.”

Ryan remembers something.  “He may not say anything much ‘bout anything, but he sure said one important thing tonight.”  Esposito wordlessly asks the question.  “He said he wanted _his_ Beckett.  Since when’s Beckett been anyone’s?  And he said he hadn’t ditched her.”  Light dawns across both detectives’ faces.  “They’ve been gettin’ it on.”

“Nah.  That don’t fit.  He said she didn’t want a relationship.”

“Don’t mean they weren’t gettin’ it on.  Just means Beckett wouldn’t dive in.  How dumb can she get?”  Esposito shakes his head.  “She’s gotta get her head out of homicide sometime.  She’s gonna crash and burn.”  And that’s brought them back to where they started.

“How’re we gonna stop her crashing?”

“Fix them.”  Which is very easy to say.

“How?”

“Dunno.  I’ll think about that tomorrow.”

* * *

 

At eleven pm, Beckett’s still at her desk.  She hasn’t gone to Archives, she hasn’t lost her focus on this case.  She hasn’t stopped, or eaten, or wept.  All she’s done is worked, and drunk endless cups of coffee. She can do this.  She can stay away from the edge.  She doesn’t have to fall into the pit.

But the effort it’s taking her not to fall is ripping her apart.  She keeps working: there’s always work.  When she can’t keep her eyes open any longer, she sets the alarm on her phone for six am, and stretches out on the break room couch.  If she goes home, she’ll have too much time to think on the way.  If she goes down in the elevator, she’ll stop at the Archives floor, and begin.  If she doesn’t leave, she can go home at lunchtime (when she won’t have time to go to Archives, and if she did go the file she pulls would be noted and reported) and get a replacement change of clothes (or more than one) to store in her locker and do the same again tomorrow, and the next day, and the next, until her past stops beating down her defences.  And if she can’t do anything else to stop herself, then she can go out with Lanie and blot out the world, and Lanie will get her home safely, and alone.  She can deal with this.  She can stay clear of the edge.

But the worst thing is, she doesn’t want to.


	63. Never thought I'd need so many people

At six a.m. the bullpen is mercifully empty.  Beckett eases out the break room, trying to stretch out the cramps in her back and shoulders from the uncomfortable, too short couch, and goes up to the gym for a little gentle sparring to warm up her muscles and try to reduce her tension.  Another night’s sleep hasn’t made the comfortable lies that she can’t believe any more truthful, or any more comforting.  She showers and changes, goes out to get coffee – it’s too early to be hungry: she’ll get a muffin and more coffee later.  (Not a bear claw.  She’s gone off them.  They were just a passing phase.)  It’s not so unusual for her to be in shortly after seven that anyone will remark on it, especially as she’s in clean clothes. 

Then she clears all extraneous furniture from around her desk.  She can’t bear to see him, and the reminders that he’d destroyed everything she’d hoped for.  She’d thought, right back at the beginning after the very first time, that it would be difficult to deal with the ending if its cause is sitting right by your desk.  She’d had no idea how hard it would be.  She can’t deal with him.  She just can’t.  She can’t deal with her own feelings, and she won’t break in public: she’s broken – he’s broken her – quite enough in private.  All she can do is pretend that he’s not there till she can lock herself down, send him out with the boys, and not give in to her twin temptations: wrenching all the information out of him to kill herself searching, again; and letting herself think that it doesn’t matter if she can’t trust him.  It does matter.  It’s always mattered.  Because every time that her trust has been broken before it’s been an absolute disaster.  This time wouldn’t be any different.  She has to protect herself.  No-one else will.

When the boys get in, she’s shifting clues and data around the murder board; frowning direfully at the results and chewing unhappily on her lip.  She manages a greeting in response to the boys’ synchronised _Yo_ , and immediately hands them a list of follow-up queries as long as Esposito’s arm.

“How long’ve you been here, Beckett?  This looks like you never went home.”

“Sudden inspiration,” Beckett flips back, with an ironic gesture at her different outfit that allays Ryan’s concerned comment.  “Focused thought.  You could try it sometime.”  She looks more closely at them.  They look rather the worse for wear.  “There’s some nice quiet phone record searching and cross-matching to be done.  Till you get rid of the hangovers.”  Twin paired glares drill into her, with absolutely no effect.  She raises an eyebrow and is rewarded when both of them drop their eyes and get down to it.

The early part of the morning proceeds peacefully.  Espo recovers fastest – he’s probably had more practice, and certainly has a much harder head – and is discussing the next sequence of enquiries with Beckett when Castle walks in, looking considerably less hung over than Esposito thinks he has any right to be.  Beckett doesn’t even look up when Esposito greets him.  She ignores the coffee and bear claw that arrives on her desk and carries on discussing the case with Esposito.

Castle looks around for his chair.  It’s gone.  Oh.  Ahhh.  It’s not gone.  It’s next to Ryan’s desk.  He’s not putting up with that.  He’s here to shadow Beckett and that is what he is going to do.  He returns the chair to its accustomed place and sits down, daring Beckett to make an issue of it.  He doesn’t even get the satisfaction of a reaction.  He might as well not exist.

“Espo, your turn to go chasing witnesses today.”  She appears to notice Castle for the first time.  “Take Mr Castle with you.”  Esposito goes to get his jacket, thankful for his removal from the situation.

“It won’t work, you know.”  Beckett ignores him.  “I’m not going to give up and go away.  You’ll have to listen to me eventually.”  She regards him as indifferently as is possible while still being alive.   His façade cracks, momentarily.  “You have to let me explain.  _Please_ let me explain.”  She turns away from him, but not before he’s seen the exhaustion and agony in her eyes.  He put them both there.  It may be an appalling idea, but tonight he’s going round to hers and he is going to make her let him in and listen to him.  He has to explain.  If he explains it’ll make this right.  He has to make this right.  He hasn’t a hope in hell of getting her back until he makes this right.

And right now, he can’t see that he’ll make his own life right if she isn’t in it.  Somehow.

Esposito returns and shepherds him out, much as Ryan had done yesterday.  Unlike Ryan, Esposito isn’t interested in the problem.  He’s interested in the solution.  Specifically, how Castle intends to fix it, and how soon, and what he and Ryan can do.  Which is a bit of a problem, since Castle doesn’t yet have a clue, and his depth of utter misery is not conducive to thinking rationally.  The conversation does not proceed well, and Esposito gives up trying after the third grunt in response.

* * *

 

It’s possibly fortunate that Castle’s chair is still at Beckett’s desk when Montgomery emerges from the elevator, tetchy from an early meeting at 1PP.  He had regarded Castle’s absence with some interest, and not a little suspicion, yesterday; and Beckett’s neutral explanation that Castle was following Ryan to experience a different style of cop work and flesh out one of his other characters did nothing to dispel his impression that something had changed.  It’s also fortunate that Castle’s following Esposito today, albeit not by his own choice, because sending him off with Espo has apparently added verisimilitude to yesterday’s explanation.

She has no idea what she’ll do about tomorrow.  Maybe by then she’ll have a defence to the strangling need to go to Archives, to drop back into her addictions; an answer to the quinine-bitter taste of trust misplaced.  Just that.  Only that.  No other emotion except broken trust at all.  Especially not... just not.  She won’t even _think_ that.  If she thinks _that_ she’ll fall apart.

She could ask Montgomery to kick him out.  That would solve the problem.  She can’t be expected to be shadowed by someone she can’t trust to have her back when the bullets fly.  Except that she can’t put that reason up convincingly, after he saved her life weeks back, and every other explanation will result in Montgomery dragging the whole story out of her.  For all her substantial skill as an interrogator, Montgomery has nearly twenty years’ experience on her, and he won’t hesitate to use it all.  She doesn’t share her private life, and _Please sir he’s not my friend any more_ doesn’t even work in pre-K, let alone for an adult.

But.  There is a possible answer.  She hasn’t taken any of her accumulated leave for months, apart from the two days Lanie bullied her into taking, and she’s built up a huge amount of official overtime.  (She doesn’t think about the amount of unofficial overtime she’s put in.)  She could take some time off, get out of New York City; away from the precinct and temptation and her demons and addictions.  Away from the Archives, and the files.  A fortnight would do it: give her time to go cold turkey; conquer the clawing, scratching need to investigate; time to internalise the pain, cover it over; time to re-establish normality, to be able to deal with him following her around for  _research_ . 

Yes.  A fortnight’s vacation at the cabin, deep in the Catskills, alone.  Where it won’t matter if she dreams; and won’t matter if she wakes crying if she does; and won’t matter that he found something, because she won’t be able to act on it; and won’t matter that he betrayed her.  Where it won’t matter that he made her fall in love with him, and then took all her hope away.

She nods decisively to herself.  Problem solved.  And if there’s a little voice in her head whispering poisonously that she’s not solving this problem, she’s just running away from it, she’s not listening.

She enters Montgomery’s office to request her fortnight’s leave.  She’s sure he’ll consent: he’s always reminding the team to take their accumulated leave.  Buoyed up on a thought-through plan, she even thinks that if she has to, she can deal with Castle’s highly undesirable presence around the precinct tomorrow.  It’s only one day.  And maybe he could follow Montgomery around for a day:  see how the big boss does it.  Another day in which he wouldn’t be near her.  Another day in which he wouldn’t remind her of everything she used to have.  So much loved, she’d been.  So much loved, and all killed in an alley, ten years ago.  And just as she’d thought she was getting over it, and the other betrayals, just as she’d finally found someone she completely believed that she could wholly trust, who didn’t ask too much of her or want more than she could give, and would wait for her to be ready, and then just as she’d begun to think that there might be more than that – just as she’d thought she _was_ ready to give more, indeed, to give everything - he’d proved it was all built on quicksand.  Betrayal bites hard.

Montgomery is not receptive to the idea of being shadowed by Castle.  At least, not on a day when Beckett is on duty.  He might do it when Beckett’s on vacation, he tells her.  He spots her unconscious twist of distaste as he refuses with considerable and well-concealed concern.  He decides to keep a careful eye on his team for a little while; and not just because of the clear-up stats.  He remembers that there’s a poker game Saturday, too.  If he needs to, he can always indulge in a little interrogation then.  He’s sure that Castle had come to the precinct, whatever he said about inspiration, with an only marginally secondary objective of, crudely, getting into his best detective’s pants.  He hadn’t exactly made a secret of his interest in her _other_ attributes.  But he’d thought that had changed.  Hmm.  He hasn’t forgotten how to investigate just because he drives a desk these days.  He is _not_ having his best team disrupted.  By anything.  Or anyone.  And whoever’s fault it is, he will deal with it.  He casts a speculative glance around the bullpen from his office.  Ah yes.  Ryan.  His expression doesn’t change one bit. 

“Sure, you can have a fortnight’s leave, Beckett.  Starting at end of shift tomorrow.  I don’t wanna see you back here till Monday morning after it.  Looks like you could use a break.  And if you want longer, that’ll be fine too.”  He detects a very slight flick in her otherwise steady gaze.  Oh yes, he’s still a detective.  Something’s going on in his bullpen.  He’ll have found out what it is before tomorrow night.  Starting with Ryan, this afternoon.

Montgomery’s lunchtime sandwich is especially piquant now that he’s got some detecting of his own to do.  He’s missed it.  Too much management and not enough case work makes Roy a dull boy.

Having achieved her goal, Beckett is sufficiently relieved to present bland unreceptiveness to every effort Ryan makes to try to find out how she is.  She emits platitude after platitude and steers conversation back to the case after every attempted diversion.  Her walls are so well built that Ryan can’t even be sure that she’s upset at all.  Asking is unlikely to be helpful.  He wanders out for his standard pastrami on rye at lunchtime without having got any further, either with Beckett or a solution that might help sort it all out.

When he wanders back, he gets wandered right into Montgomery’s office without really understanding how it happened.

“Detective Ryan.”  Uh-oh.  “Shut the door, please.”  Er…huh?  He doesn’t think he’s done anything to deserve the dressing down that those words normally portend.  But Captain Montgomery doesn’t look pissed.  He looks focused.  Intently so.  This is not going to be good, Ryan can tell, even if he’s not the one in the shit.

“Sir?”

“Is something disturbing your partnership with Detective Esposito?”  You what now?

“No, sir.  Everything is fine with us.”  What is going on here?

“Why aren’t you out canvassing with him?”  Oh.  Uh-oh.  Ryan is equal shares impressed and terrified by Montgomery’s evident ability to pick up the tiniest change in the bullpen atmosphere.

“I took Castle out with me yesterday.”  Ryan grins in what he hopes is a _you-know-how-Castle-is_ way that conveys the difficulty of having a civilian around.  “So it was Esposito’s turn today.”  It’s perfectly true.  It’s not the whole truth, but it’s perfectly true as far as it goes.

Montgomery regards Ryan with a basilisk eye.  “Hmm,” he mutters.  There’s a short gap in conversation.  Ryan’s just thinking he’s got away clean when Montgomery takes a different line.  “Did you discuss this change with Detective Beckett?”

“Yes sir.”  Well, she discussed it with them.  Sort of.  If a direct order can be said to be a discussion.

“And she agreed it?”

“She didn’t object, sir.”  Another not-lie.

Montgomery focuses his gaze on Ryan, who is trying very hard not to squirm guiltily.  Ryan knows perfectly well that he’s shading the truth, but he is not willing to be in the middle of an argument between his direct and ultimate boss.  Montgomery emits an irritable sigh.  He knows that something’s wrong between the four of them.  He just doesn’t know what it is.  Yet.  But if he had to bet his pension on it, he’d bet on it being between Beckett and Castle.  He doesn’t know which way the boys will jump, but if Castle’s followed Ryan yesterday and Esposito today without his corpse being called in as a new homicide (so far), then the boys are coming down on Castle’s side.  That’s… not just unexpected.  He’s astonished that that’s the case.  He’d have thought that they’d have quietly taken Castle aside and beaten hell out him.  All his detective instincts are screaming.

“Detective Ryan.”  The undertone goes straight to Ryan’s hindbrain.  “Whose idea was it that Castle followed you yesterday and Detective Esposito today?”  Shit.  Beckett’s about to be busted.

“Detective Beckett’s, sir.”

“Thank you,” says Montgomery, with extreme sarcasm.  “Please send her in.  Dismissed.”

Ryan slinks out to inform Beckett that Montgomery requires her presence, and manages to tip her off that it’s about Castle.  It gives her just enough time to pull down the shutters before she enters her Captain’s office and stands at confident parade rest in front of him.

“Sir?  Ryan said you wanted to see me.”

“Yes, Beckett.  I was under the impression that Castle was shadowing you.”

“Yes, sir.”

“So why, Beckett, is he following Detective Esposito today?”  She’s got this.  Her excuse has been ready since six a.m.

“Well, sir,” she grins, in a _let-me-share-the-joke-with-you_ way, accompanied by a conspiratorial glance at the bullpen.  “Ryan and Esposito don’t know this, but…”  she snickers.

“But what?” asks Montgomery, clearly not expecting this mischievous, confident response.

“But he’s basing two pretty major characters on them,” she snickers again, “so he needs to know how they behave.”  She manages an outright snigger.  “He hadn’t got the names for them, last I heard, but..”  She pauses, and laughs.  It had been very funny, even if she hates him.  “… he’s got a pair nickname for them and it’s _Roach_.”  Montgomery just looks at her, astounded.

“Castle is calling a pair of detectives based on Ryan and Esposito _Roach?_ Are you serious?”  Beckett nods, still grinning widely.  Montgomery gives up any attempt to control himself, and laughs till he can barely breathe.  “Roach.  Huh.  Roach.” 

“Don’t tell them, sir, please.  I wanna see their faces when they find out.”  Montgomery grins evilly back at her.

“I won’t.  So he’s building characters from others here?”  Becket nods again.  “Hmm.  I might make some enquiries.  I don’t want to be known as any form of verminous nickname.”  He looks at her again.  “Okay, Beckett.  But don’t forget he’s here to shadow you.  I don’t want him distracting Ryan and Espo.  Dismissed.”

Montgomery watches Beckett leave and admires her ability to deflect, distract and deny, without telling a single lie.  Still, whatever she just said, her earlier behaviour is not consistent with that.  He’ll observe tomorrow, when Castle will be back shadowing her, and then he’ll know what’s wrong.  And then he’ll fix it.  He needs his detective at full form.  1PP is not forgiving, and since Castle joined, and in defiance of all his, Montgomery’s, fears, the solve rate has improved.  Castle as part of the team is good for that, and therefore good for him.  He doesn’t intend that that should change just because Beckett’s got some beef with Castle. 

He does wonder, momentarily, if they’ve got together and this is a lovers’ spat, but dismisses that idea fairly quickly.  Beckett wouldn’t bring a lovers’ spat to the precinct.  Sure, he had bet on them getting together, but Beckett is far too professional to let a minor quarrel, or even a break-up, affect her work.  Something else is going on, and he will certainly find out what.

 _Phew_ , thinks Beckett as she leaves Montgomery’s office.  She doesn’t change her confident posture one jot as she leaves and walks back to her desk.  She’s got away with it, for now, but that last couple of sentences had clearly formed a warning.  Looks like she’ll have to put up with Castle tomorrow.  At least she’s got a fortnight’s vacation starting at 5pm.  She only has to get through from 10am (at earliest) till then.  And since getting out of New York on a Friday night is horrendous, she’ll go out with Lanie and then leave first thing Saturday.  She taps out a text to Lanie and all is shortly arranged.

When Ryan leaves at the end of the day, only too glad to get away from Montgomery’s piercing stares and the grilling he was given, Beckett’s sitting on the edge of the desk swinging her feet and glaring meaningfully at the evidence.  It could be any day in the years since he joined the team.  He’s actively considering telling Castle that Beckett really couldn’t care less about the situation, and that Castle should just cut his losses and walk away, when he looks back from the elevator and sees her face and posture now everyone’s gone.  She’s crumpled into herself, devastated, now she thinks no-one’s there to see.  He doesn’t know what to do about that: she won’t welcome sympathy.  So he does nothing, for now.

Beckett can’t bear to go home, doesn’t want to see Castle’s books on her bookshelves.  It doesn’t just remind her of him, which is quite painful enough, it reminds her of her mother, and she can’t afford to be reminded of her mother right now.  She doesn’t need that last straw.  She’s fighting hard enough not to give in to the bleak temptation of falling right back into it; wringing every last piece of knowledge from Castle and diving straight back down.   Come eleven, emotionally and mentally exhausted, she curls down on the break room couch again and tries to sleep despite her caffeine overload.

She’s resisted for another day.

* * *

 

Castle moves through the day in the miasma of misery that has coated him since all his plans and hopes and dreams backfired in five short minutes in the hospital.  He’s no suggestions for Esposito, no solutions, no plans and no hope.  All he can think of is that he’ll go to Beckett’s apartment later on in the evening (no point going early, she won’t be there) and stay there till she lets him in, however long that is.

And so he does.  He’s not at all surprised – unhappy, but that’s not exactly new today – that there’s no answer.  He gives it five minutes, and tries again.  When there’s no sound from within, he tries a new tack and dials her phone.  He wasn’t going to do that, since the wonder that is Caller ID will ensure that she doesn’t answer him, but at least he’ll know that he’s in the right location.  He doesn’t hear a phone ring, either.  It’s past ten, and she isn’t home.  He vacillates for a few seconds.  She could easily be on her way home, and if he leaves for the precinct – he can’t think where else she might be – he’ll miss her, and there will be another go-around of this whole frigid disinterest tomorrow.  Going to the precinct just does not seem like a good plan, yet.  Even late at night there are other alert ears within range.  Or she’s gone out with Lanie, and he is not having this discussion – should he get the chance to have any discussion at all – anywhere in public, let alone in front of Lanie’s interested, far too inquisitive input.  In the end he scrawls a note on a sheet from his travelling notepad, slides it, not without some difficulty, under Beckett’s door and goes home.

He hasn’t written a single word of Nikki since the hospital.  He hasn’t a single iota of inspiration.  He’s right back to the writer’s block he had the day before she strode into his life and turned it inside out.  This time he’s not frightened by it.  He’s terrified. 

The only thing he can do is keep on showing up, keep on trying to talk to her.  She’s been _his_ , and some way he has to show her everything that means.  Show her that taking care of her doesn’t mean suffocation, that having a relationship doesn’t mean losing control of her life, that being in his bed doesn’t mean being his prisoner.

Show her she can be loved.


	64. Look right through me, walk right by me

At six a.m., after another uncomfortable night, punctuated by vague and horrible nightmares that she can’t remember when she wakes, Beckett repeats yesterday’s routine in every detail.  She settles into her desk and concentrates on killing paperwork.  It’s surprisingly successful: the monotonous, routine, repetitive work leaves her with only one goal: reducing it.  And reduce it she does, surprisingly rapidly.  In fact, for once in only a handful of times, she’s reached the bottom.  She should be delighted.  Instead, she looks around the bullpen hopelessly and wonders how she’s going to avoid talking, and registering Castle’s presence, if she’s got nothing much to do.  _Hell._

She decides that, since she’s done nearly three hours’ work already, now would be a good time to drop off her dirty clothes at home, get a coffee on the way back – he’ll see she doesn’t need him pretending to be friends and telling her more lies; she just needs time to recover her normal professionalism and cool civility and stop reacting in this stupid, unjustified, hurt-child way – and by that time there’ll be something more to do.  To make herself feel better about slipping out when really it’s not time for a break at all, she’ll go via the morgue and see if Lanie has any news for her on anything at all.  She refuses to consider that she’s quite carefully leaving just before the time that Castle might normally be expected to arrive, which is hardly consistent with cool civility.

The first part of her strategy proceeds successfully.  She makes it home in short order, throws a laundry load on so it’s done when she gets back to pack, and is on her way out again when she notices a crumpled piece of paper on the floor.  She shoves it into her back pocket for later and promptly forgets about it.

Lanie is not immediately obvious at the morgue, so Beckett hangs around in her office for a few minutes, to see if she turns up.  While waiting, she stuffs her hands in her pockets and discovers a piece of paper, which after a brief thought she realises is the one that she’d picked up at home.  Maybe it’s a receipt that she dropped, or something.  She smooths it out and turns it over.

Lanie walks in a moment later to find Beckett staring frozenly at a short note.

“Wassup, girlfriend?” Beckett jumps a mile high.

“Nothing.  You startled me, sneaking up on me like that.”

“And what’s that you’re reading?  Doesn’t look like nothing.”

“Nothing important.”  Beckett crumples it up and shoves it back into her pocket before Lanie gets any ideas of going all high school girls on her and taking the note.

“Any new information for me?”

“No, Kate,” Lanie says with exaggerated patience.  “You know I’d call you soon as I had anything new.”  And now she’s huffing at Kate.  “So since you know that, why are you down here?  And where’s Writer-Boy?  Shouldn’t he be with you?”

“He didn’t show up yet today.  He’s probably back at the precinct.”  Lanie is not wholly convinced.  In fact, looking at Kate, Lanie is completely unconvinced.   Especially given the low-down she’d got from Esposito. However, she and Kate are due for a drink this evening, so she’ll extract the whole story then with the assistance of the lubricant which alcohol provides.

“If nothing new arrives I’ll pick you up from the precinct at around five.  I’m not waiting for you at a bar.  You’ll forget.” Beckett splutters.

“I will _not_.”

“You’ll be late.  You’re always late.  You’ll” – Lanie makes air quotes – “ _just be finishing something_ and you’ll be an hour late.”

“That was _once._   Two years ago.  I was in Interrogation.  I said I was sorry, and I paid for all the drinks, all night.”  Beckett shrugs.  “But have it your own way.  I better get back.  Seeya later.”

Lanie watches Beckett leave and congratulates herself on success.  Beckett hasn’t even noticed that she’ll be showing up at the precinct.  She’ll just see what’s going on in the bullpen, too.  Beckett looks a little more tired than normal, and a little more tense, and a _lot_ more miserable.  And if Lanie should happen to cross paths with Writer-Boy, well, that would just be a bonus.

* * *

 

Castle arrives at the Twelfth, later than usual on the back of a sleepless night spent trying and failing to write anything acceptable, with no happy expectations of the day.  His predictions are confirmed when he puts down Beckett’s coffee and bear claw and notices that she isn’t even there.  Her computer’s on, but she’s missing.  Clearly she’s found another way of avoiding him.  He leaves his edible apologies on her desk and goes to find out what Ryan and Esposito are doing.

“Hey, guys.”

“Yo, Castle.  How ya doin’?”  Castle doesn’t want to answer that truthfully.  He falls back on his public persona and a large handful of acting talent. 

“Good.”   He smiles broadly.  “Book’s going well, too.”  Ryan and Esposito regard him with some confusion, liberally frosted with disbelief, and turn to each other.

“D’you think he’s doin’ good?”

“Naw.  D’you?”

“Nah.  I think he’s lying.”

“I think he’s forgotten what he told us in the bar.”  They turn on Castle in synchronised perfection.

“Stop shitting us, Castle.  We know you’re lying.”

At which point, simultaneously, Montgomery peers out from his office and Beckett walks out the elevator carrying a cup of coffee.  Her _hey_ is almost widely enough directed to encompass Castle.  For an instant Ryan and Esposito freeze.  Beckett hasn’t yet noticed Montgomery.  Castle hasn’t noticed Beckett, or Montgomery.  Beckett has, however, noticed Castle.  She sits down at her desk, still clean, tidy and empty of anything urgent to do; ignores the other cup of coffee and the pastry, and concentrates on her screen.  The bite of pain when she sees him hasn’t lessened one degree.

Castle sits down in his chair.  Beckett ignores him with the same intensity she’s ignoring the coffee and bear claw.

“Beckett… I wanna explain.  I’m sorry.”  She ignores him more intensely still.  He tries again.

“I left you a note.  You weren’t in.  I tried to come and see you to apologise.”  Still nothing.  He may be in the wrong here, but right now so is she.  She won’t even listen.  His temper’s starting to rise.  He sees her pattern: something goes wrong, she locks down, blocks out, shuts off.  He’s not going to let her do that to him.  He’s never let her do that to him.

“You have to talk to me sometime.  I’m not going away till you listen.  You don’t get to shut me out without listening.  Shout, or yell at me, or anything; but not silence.”  He’d written that, all those weeks ago.  More silence.  His currently fragile temper, control weakened by pain and sleeplessness and terror that he’s blocked again, snaps in the face of her behaviour.

“Stop pretending there’s nothing left between us.  You’re just running away from it because you’re scared.  That’s why you won’t let me explain.  You’re still _mine_ , Beckett, and you’re too scared to admit it.”

“I’m not yours,” she bites.  “No way.”

“That’s not what you said in bed.”  If it’s all gone to hell, he’ll say what he likes and at least provoke her into yelling back.  He _won’t_ be shut out.

“That was when I thought you could be trusted.  You can’t.  There’s no acceptable reason for what you did.”

“I said I was sorry.  I am sorry.  Why won’t you listen to me?”

“No explanation is going to change the facts.  You think an apology on a sheet from a dime-store notebook is gonna solve the only thing you care about – your blue balls?  All you want is sex.  The hell with that.  Here’s what I think of that _and_ your pathetically hopeless attempt at an apology.  We are _done_.”  And she crumples the note viciously and throws it in the trash.

“We are _not done_ , Beckett.”  She stands up violently, shoves the unwanted coffee at him and storms off. 

Montgomery watches those two minutes with extreme interest from his doorframe, having made an emphatic and unmistakable gesture to Ryan and Esposito which indicates that, should they do anything at all that reveals his presence to either Beckett or Castle, they will not survive the day.  He notices a number of things.  Beckett had her own coffee, and didn’t touch either the cup which (he expects) Castle brought or the paper bag next to it.  Nor did she look at, or talk to, Castle.  Her body language was completely closed.  Castle’s body language started apologetic, if anything, but quickly got angry.  Whatever he was trying to say to her, though, wasn’t finding favour.  Montgomery couldn’t hear what it was, but it had an incendiary effect on Beckett.  She pulled something out her pocket, dropped it ostentatiously in the trash, shoved Castle’s coffee at him with a gesture which should have taken his head off, and whipped out in the direction of the gym.  And still Castle didn’t move.  And still neither Beckett nor Castle knew he was watching. Well.  Well, well, well.  Trouble in paradise.

Montgomery returns to his desk and considers the buck which has crashed to a stop on it, assembling his facts as a good detective does (and he had been a very good detective.  That’s why he’s a captain now.)  Fact one: as he’d already surmised, the trouble is between Beckett and Castle.  Fact two: Beckett’s asked for a fortnight’s leave.  Fact three: this is not a minor spat between friends, partners or lovers.  This is serious.  Fact four: Beckett was, and still may be, (and probably, if Montgomery doesn’t fix this, is) heading for burnout at break-neck speed; if she doesn’t find another interest in her life.  Montgomery had thought that providing a large distraction, in the shape of one Rick Castle, un-ignorable celebrity author, would help.  It’s the main reason he’d agreed to his presence.  The great PR had been a happy side-effect.  Up till three days ago, he’d thought his plan was working, too.  Beckett was still spending far, far too many hours in the precinct, but she appeared to be having more fun, laughing more, snap and spark and sparkle all coming back.  He’d even, very secretly, hoped that Beckett would just let the blazing sexual tension between them take over, and placed his bet accordingly.  Nobody in the bullpen could miss it.  It’s not that she _needs_ an affair, or a man – Montgomery is not of the view that simply getting laid solves anyone’s problems: men, women or little green aliens – but it might get her out the precinct occasionally.  Even if she had another friend, not associated with the NYPD, it would help.  She has no apparent hobbies.  No interests except homicide: even her favourite reading matter is murder mysteries. 

He really does not want Beckett to burn out; both on a personal and professional level.  She’s too good to lose, on either basis.  She’s been here before, too, but for different reasons…uh-oh…

Fact five: Castle is nosy.  He always wants the story, the ending.  Oh, for Chrissake.  He didn’t go after Beckett’s story, did he?  Fact six: Beckett took some pretty heavyweight threatening and a hefty dose of therapy to back off her mom’s case the last time round.  Aw, _shit_.

“Detective Esposito, a word please?”  Esposito marches in, and in obedience to Montgomery’s gesture, shuts the door.

“How much does Castle know about Beckett?”  Espo doesn’t try to prevaricate.

“He knows about her mom.”  Montgomery raises faintly interrogative brows. “She told him.  The short version.”

“Thanks.  Dismissed.”  Esposito vacates the office, feeling as if he’s dodged a bullet, though he’s not sure why.

Montgomery is not going to speak to either Beckett or Castle now.  He’ll interrogate – the word is entirely _not_ accidental – Castle after the poker game.  No point ruining a good evening.  And he’ll leave Beckett till after she’s had her vacation.  She’s possibly taking a sensible course of action: reaching for space to deal with the problem and cool her temper.  He’s never seen her this riled up, but she’d better get it under control, stat.  He’s not having this in his bullpen.  Her break might be enough for him not to need to intervene.  It might.  But he really does not think it will be.  Still, that can wait until she’s back.

* * *

 

Beckett returns some half-an-hour later, the tips of her hair still wet, slightly flushed along her cheekbones, make-up re-applied, and, Castle notes, rather reddened knuckles.   He deduces that she’s taken out her fury on the punch bag, and that it would take very little provocation for her to do so again.  She’s brought the ice-wall down again, after the explosion. 

He briefly wonders if he should simply use her own proclivities and predilections to solve this: take her out and push her up against a wall and kiss her till she submits, because she liked some force, and domination, and being fought to a standstill.  

But that was back when it was a consensual, consenting game, with safe words and mutual enjoyment.  _And trust, Rick.  Don’t forget that.  Back when she trusted you._ There’s no way this would be consensual, or consenting, because she doesn’t trust him any more.  And he still _will not ever_ be that other man, no matter how strong the temptation.

But he wants to.  In a tiny pitch-black portion of his mind containing all the pitch-black thoughts he’ll never act on, he wants to reach out and take what’s his: bring her back and keep her with him and never, ever let her leave him: physically, mentally or emotionally.  He really, really wants to.

He won’t.

He’s picked his note out the trash, before it could be dissolved in undrunk coffee.  There’s a full cup, cold now, sitting forlornly on her desk.  She hadn’t put a single finger on it, not even to push it out her way, until she shoved it at him: as if the slightest touch on anything he’s touched would pollute her: touch pitch, and be yourself defiled.  Looks like he’s pitch. 

In the sulky fluorescent lights of the bullpen, his crumpled note seems weak, pathetic.  _Beckett, I’m sorry.  Let me explain. R_.  But Beckett doesn’t want an explanation, Beckett doesn’t care.  The magnitude of the challenge to win even enough time to explain dispirits him, and he slumps in the uncomfortable chair.  At least it hadn’t been removed today.  Such a small, petty, trivial item.  One halfpennyworth of bread to an intolerable deal of sack.  No successful battle in his future.

He should go home.  He’s not wanted at this desk, and no body’s dropped.  Everyone’s doing paperwork.  He should go home, but at home is only the blank screen waiting for his non-existent words or the nagging, guilt-inducing screen saver.  No inspiration, no enthusiasm, no words.  No joy.  Only the crumpled sheets and coverlet on his large bed: as wide, as arid, and as empty as the Atacama desert.

Okay, it’s not as if she’d been in his bed that often, but even simply knowing she could be, and more frequently he in hers, had comforted him; let him see that he had become far more than the playboy he had been.  He’d found who he could be; found people he liked, respected and wanted to spend time with, an antidote to the playboy PR poisoning his life; found a woman with whom he wanted – and still wants – a proper, serious, permanent relationship.  And it’s all disintegrated around him, and it’s still all his own fault for not being honest earlier.

He goes for lunch with the boys: at least that’s company; returns to his post.  If Beckett noticed he’d left, or that he’d returned, she’s not showing it.  But Ryan said _keep showing up, she’s utterly miserable_ , so that’s what he’ll do, for as long as he can, as long as he’s allowed to by Montgomery, until she listens to his explanation.  He is not leaving till she listens.

And so the long day passes, sullen, slow and silent.

* * *

 

At five pm, Beckett’s area of the bullpen is shrouded in depression and gloom.  Even the boys have stopped trying to lighten the atmosphere, ground down by the paperwork and the tension between Beckett and Castle.  Beckett hasn’t mentioned her fortnight’s leave to the boys yet.  She doesn’t want to explain for any longer than she has to, and it’s not as if there’s anything to hand over.  They already know everything about what’s been on her desk.  She finishes clearing up everything possible, and then swings over to Ryan and Esposito.

“I’m taking a vacation for two weeks.  I’ve cleared everything on my desk.  Think you can manage without me?”  The boys look flabbergasted.  Beckett ignores the strangled gasp behind her.

“Vacation?  You?  You’re taking vacation?”

“Yeah, vacation.  You understand the concept, don’t you?  I haven’t had one for a while.”

“Where’re you going?  Disneyland?  Hollywood?”  Beckett makes a noise of disgust.

“Not likely.  Out of Manhattan, for sure.  I need a break from the city.  Manhattan’s all glitz without substance.”  That’s not weighted or directed in any way at all, but there’s another indrawn gasp.  “I’m going to have solitude.  Peace and quiet.  Read a few good books.  Sleep without an alarm clock.  Eat something that doesn’t come in Styrofoam.”

“Where you gonna find that?”  Beckett has no intention of answering that.  If Castle’s going to turn up on her Manhattan doorstep, there’s too much of a chance he’ll turn up in the Catskills, too.  It’s only a couple of hours out of town.  She’s opening her lips on _I haven’t decided yet_ when a confident New York twang announces –

“You’re going to your dad’s cabin, aren’t you?” 

Thanks, Lanie.  That was really _not_ helpful.  And – _oh fuck­_ – Lanie knows approximately where it is.  And Beckett has no confidence at all that Lanie is on her side when it comes to getting rid of Castle.  She flips round and is frantically making cut-it-out-shut-up gestures at Lanie, who finally realises it.

“C’mon, Lanie, let’s go.”  Lanie hears a clear note of we’re-getting-out-of-here-now panic in Beckett’s normally calm, cool voice.  Hmm.  This is far too interesting to leave already.

“I just got here.  No hurry.  I wanna catch my breath and say hello to everyone.  Haven’t been over here for a while.”  Lanie perches on the corner of Beckett’s desk and smiles widely at Castle.  It’s the first friendly female face he’s seen since breakfast.  His answering smile doesn’t carry its normal wattage, Lanie notices.  Hmm again.  Panicky, unhappy Beckett, unhappy Castle.  Lanie’s well-developed relationship-disaster-zone antennae twitch violently.  She smiles even more widely at Castle, who simply adds confusion to his unhappiness.

Lanie, not unusually, has some ideas.  Kate’s frequent denials notwithstanding, Lanie had been perfectly certain that Kate and Castle have been getting it on, and Ryan and Esposito had shared their deductions with her too.  About time Kate had some fun.  It doesn’t hurt that Castle is practically perfect in every way, for Kate.  But it doesn’t look like her life’s any fun right now.  Well, Lanie can fix that, for this evening.  And if the three boys should just happen to show up a little later, that would just be a happy coincidence, right?  Kate’s being as blocked off, intransigent and downright dumb as Lanie’s ever seen her.  If it wasn’t for the fact that Kate’s five full inches taller than her and trained in various forms of offense and defence, Lanie would smack her.  Instead, she’ll ram some sense down Kate’s throat.  Sense, in this context, meaning resolving her problem with Castle, not running away from him.  And preferably then getting back with him.  But that will go down a lot easier after Kate’s had a few drinks.

Beckett collects her purse and makes a decisive move for the elevator, clearly expecting Lanie to follow her.  However, Lanie’s slid off Kate’s desk and is swapping smiles and chat with Ryan and Esposito.

It’s just as well Beckett can’t hear the conversation.

“Yeah, we think they were gettin’ it on too.  He practically said so.” 

“She’s absolutely miserable, but she’s hiding it.”

Lanie thinks for a mere instant.

“Okay, in an hour or so, when I’ve poured a few drinks down Beckett, I’ll text you where we are and you can coincidentally show up.  All three of you.”

“Are you sure ‘bout this, Lanie?  Strikes me that this could turn into a complete clusterfuck.  Beckett ain’t exactly keen on interference.”  Espo thinks Lanie’s out her everlovin’ mind.

“You want this to carry on, Espo?”  And then Lanie asks the question she should have asked right off the bat.  “What’s he done, anyway?”

“He started looking into her mom’s case.”  Lanie’s eyes widen.

“Okay.  Maybe give me an hour ‘n’ a half, two hours.  Pour some booze down Castle, too.  He looks like he needs it.  I’ll text ya.”  Lanie scrambles after Beckett, who’s been tapping impatient fingers on the wall by the elevator since she got there.

When they’re descending in the elevator, Lanie starts to implement her plan.  Sun Tzu has _nothing_ on her when it comes to strategy.  “Where we goin’, girl?  I want cocktails and music and pretty boys to look at.”  She leers happily.  Beckett considers.  She wants to be at home, packing and indulging her miserable mood.  But from the angry, intent look on Castle’s face during the earlier argument, she’s sure that he’ll try to turn up again if she does.  So Lanie’s suggestion sounds good.  A lot of drinks, some eye-candy, some more drinks; and if she has the hangover from hell tomorrow it won’t matter because she’s not at work and she doesn’t have to leave early to get to the cabin.

“Okay,” Beckett agrees.  “You choose.”  Lanie thinks for a minute, mentally riffling through her extensive list of suitable nightspots.

“Let’s hit the Ella Lounge.  Get us some glamour.  First round’s on me.”


	65. I'll be my own saviour

As it’s relatively early, despite Lanie’s delaying tactics, Lanie and Beckett find a comfortable corner.  Lanie insists on lining them up and organises their glasses: enough alcohol on the table for liver transplants to be a very likely outcome of the evening.  Beckett regards her glass and the high-alcohol liquid in it; picks it up, knocks it back and slams it down in one rapid motion.  The second one lasts only a little longer. 

Lanie watches her with some trepidation.  The last time she’d seen Kate do this had been after she’d split with Sorenson, and that had felt to Lanie as if it had more to do with hurt pride than a broken heart.  It had been a long night, and she’d had to pour Kate into a cab and take her home at the end of it.  Her own hangover had been horrible.  She hates to think how Kate would have felt.  And since that night Kate’s never referred to Sorenson outside a professional context ever again. It looks to Lanie that Kate’s going for the same solution now, with the addition of running away upstate; but Lanie thinks that would be a huge mistake.  Sorenson hadn’t appreciated Kate having a career of her own: (and Lanie’s sure there was more to it, but Kate has never talked about it) Castle recognises that it’s who she is. More importantly, Kate’s been becoming a lot more grounded in the last three months.  No less driven, but some way less frantic about it.

But now she’s two strong cocktails down in less than fifteen minutes and clearly heading for alcohol induced oblivion as fast as she can manage it.

“So what’s this about a vacation, girl?”

“I want one.  You got a problem with that, Lanie?”  Beckett’s clearly spoiling for a fight, too.  Lanie really does not feel like dealing with drunk, aggressive Kate, which right now is a very likely – and very unusual - outcome.  Time to talk her down.

“No.  I think it’s the right thing for you.  You could do with a vacation.  I was gonna suggest it but you’re two steps ahead.”

Beckett is somewhat disarmed.  She’d expected Lanie to read her a lecture on running away, not provide active encouragement.  Instead of downing the third glass of whatever Lanie’s ordered, she sets it back down and contemplates it with satisfaction, swirling the liquid gently.  Lanie breathes a silent sigh of relief.

“I just need a break, Lanie.  Detox.”  Lanie splutters.

“Girl, last time I suggested we do a spa you told me if I took you to one you’d choke me with a mud mask.  Don’t give me that detox crap.”

“Brain detox.  Peace and quiet.”  Lanie makes an ironic, expansive gesture at the club around them.  “It’s only tonight, Lanie.  Tomorrow I’ll go off to Dad’s cabin and clear my head” -

“And your hangover, if you carry on knocking these back at that speed,” Lanie interjects.

“ – and relax.”  Lanie chokes.

“Relax?  You?  Relax?  Who are you and what have you done with Kate Beckett?  You never relax.”

“Do so,” mutters Beckett sulkily.

“Do not.  When?”

“When I’m running.  When I’m sparring.”  Lanie looks absolutely disgusted with her.

“That’s not you relaxing.  That’s you training.  An’ I bet you think about your cases when you’re doing both.”  Beckett says nothing, and Lanie nods with satisfaction.  “Told you so.  Relax my ass.”

“I do want to relax.”  Beckett takes another sip of her drink.  The first two are pleasantly wrapping fuzz around her head.

“Yeah, right.  What’s really up?”  Lanie sounds wholly sympathetic, but Beckett’s not had nearly enough to loosen her tongue that far.  She compromises on revealing the easy problem.

“Castle decided to look into my mother’s case.  Without asking me and after I’d told him to lay off it.”  Sharks would have envied the bite in her tone, Lanie thinks.  “I thought he could be trusted.  He can’t.”  She swallows another sip.  Her tone is as white and clean and cold as Carrara marble.  “I’m going up to the cabin to clear it out my head.”  Lanie’s getting slightly fuzzed herself.

“Clear which?”

“Mom’s case.  Nothing else to clear.”  But her gaze flicks down and away from Lanie as she says it, burns into her drink.

“Girl,” says Lanie softly.  “Girl, you can’t cure it by running from it.  It’ll still be right there when you come back.”  She isn’t only referring to the case, but she can see Kate ignoring that.

“It might still be there, but I won’t be sucked back in.”  She turns to Lanie, green eyes terrified.  “I can’t get sucked back in, Lanie.  I’ll never get out of it.  I gotta get away from the precinct before I dive back in.” 

She empties the cocktail down her throat and chases it with a gulp of the next, clings to the glass like it’s her lifebelt.  Lanie says nothing, for a while, pats her knee occasionally while Kate grimly clutches her drink.  After a while Lanie orders some food, and Kate picks at it without really realising it’s there.  Kate hasn’t said a word for twenty minutes, and Lanie’s getting bored of surfing on her cellphone, though she knows that Kate needs her there.  Not that Kate would ever admit needing Lanie out loud.  Kate’s paid that debt to Lanie forward long since, though, on other nights in other bars, when Lanie’s needed her, and sat silent herself. 

Beckett’s now reaching the cotton-wool stage of alcohol induced brain-deadening.  She makes a minor effort and talks again.

“Lanie,” she says, only a small slur at the edges of her voice, “I’m not good company.  I wanna go home now.  ‘M sorry for spoiling your evening.”  She stands, takes a moment to steady herself on her legs, snags her jacket with only a slight wobble, hands over some bills.  “Night.  Seeya in a fortnight.”

Lanie picks up her latest drink and sips thoughtfully.  It’s barely a quarter of seven.  Then she picks up her phone again and texts Esposito.  _At Ella Lounge.  Beckett went home.  Company welcome._   The boys arrive a few minutes later.  Notably, Castle is not with them.

“Where’s Writer-Boy?  Thought you were keeping him with you?”

“Ryan told him at lunchtime what Beckett looked like when she thought no-one could see,”  Ryan nods,  “so when he saw your text, he took off.  Didn’t even finish his drink.”  Esposito smiles slightly smugly.  “Left enough on the table to cover a week’s drinks.  So it’ll cover this too.  He said to use it.”  Smugness is dented when he sees Lanie’s expression.  Ryan looks for the nearest cover to avoid the blast radius.

“You let Castle go off lookin’ for Beckett on his own?  Are you dumb or what?  I thought you wanted this fixed.”

“Sure I do.  An’ if he catches up with her they’ll talk.  See?  Fixed.”

Lanie emits a cross between a groan and a scream.  “You dumbass brain dead idiot man.  What the hell planet you on?”  She’s getting more New York by the syllable, brakes released courtesy of her absolute fury and her own drinking.  “There ain’t no way Beckett’s gonna let him talk to her.  Youse boys couldn’ta screwed this up better if you tried all year.  Beckett’ll ram her gun up his ass and start shooting if she sees him now.  An’ you!”  Ryan tries to duck.  “Thought you’d had girlfriends, not like Mister Macho Special Forces dumb cluck here who hasn’t got a goddamn clue ‘cause he’s never dated an intelligent woman in his whole dumbass life.  What the hell you thinkin’ of?  Didya think this was a good plan too?  Didya?”  Lanie in give-it-hell mode is a fearsome sight.  The boys are open-mouthed.  “Youse get on your phones and stop him.  If he goes to see Beckett we’ll never fix this.  Get dialling, now!”

Castle isn’t picking up his phone, though.  Espo rings, Ryan rings, Lanie rings. (and takes the opportunity to programme Castle’s number into her phone when she does.)  She’s still raging at them when they’ve all tried twice. 

Castle hears his phone ring, and keep ringing, and keeps ignoring it.  He’s outside Beckett’s apartment, waiting for her to get there.  Lanie said she was coming home.  Ryan said she was utterly miserable.  He has to see her before she goes away.  He keeps on waiting, and she keeps on not showing up, till he has to go or risk arrest for loitering.  But he leaves another note, to prove he tried.

Beckett hasn’t even tried to go home.  Alcohol or not, padding settled round her brain or not, she doesn’t trust Lanie not to interfere.  Instead, she’s headed for a very particular place.  It’s still full daylight, so it won’t close for some time.  When she gets there, she sits on the soft, neatly mown green grass, heedless of her dress pants, and rests her heavy head, chin on her knees, arms round her legs, curled close into herself.  She doesn’t move, or speak, or show any emotion at all.  She just sits, alone in the cool of the evening, and empties her mind, not registering the pale flowers around her; the grey or white monuments, triumphs of some stonemason’s art.  She’s seen them all so often before.  Silence drifts softly around her: a shroud, a pall.  Time passes by her, minute after minute, unnoticed; all the clocks stopped; no chimes or tolling bell to disturb this peace.  Here, she can ignore the city: the noise, the bustle, the energy, the mass of pushing, hurrying people.  None of these exist, or matter, here in God’s acre.

Where else should a homicide detective be, if not here, surrounded by the dead; the constituents for whom she stands?  Where else should she be, but in this garden of remembrance, sitting before the reason she became a cop?

When it’s time to leave, twilight nearing, Beckett goes back to the precinct, not her home.  She’ll prove to herself she can resist temptation, for one more night.  And she does: drinking endless glasses of water to dilute the alcohol; sleeping fitfully, rising early, hangover biting; out into the cool light of morning before the heat of the summer day begins.

She returns to her apartment, switches on her clothes dryer and collapses on to her bed; wakes after she had intended to be long gone.  Still, her head is clear and this much later there is no risk at all that she is unfit to drive.  She pads out to collect the things she’ll need for her vacation: T-shirts, jackets, shorts, jeans, flat shoes and sneakers.  Nothing smart, nothing sexy.  She’ll be out in the boondocks alone, and that means comfort.  No need to display her alpha status, to be in command of the room, to intimidate.

On the floor is another piece of paper.  She picks it up, even knowing what it must be, and turns it over.  _Beckett, I’m sorry.  Please don’t shut me out. R._   She looks at it, watches the ink run through blurred vision, files it in the trash, finishes packing and leaves, switching off her phone as she goes down to the car park.  It takes her a moment to compose herself and clear her eyes before she starts the engine and pulls out.  Three hours later she’s in the depths of the Catskills, staring into a cup of coffee and trying very hard to ignore the drips of salt water pooling on the table in front of her.

* * *

 

Castle’s waiting for his poker pals, not with any great enthusiasm.  He’s festered in front of his blank page all day, still blocked.  At least he’ll have some company, and he might as well try to win big.  He hasn’t seriously gone all out to win in some time, and never in this company, but he needs to, tonight.  His friends arrive – well, Roy might be his friend, the others are, strictly speaking, contacts – the Gotham City gang; as opposed to the Crime Writers gang: everybody has a drink.  Castle’s been on Jameson, in sips, for some time, and the whiskey’s only helped his dark mood get darker. 

He’s already decided that tomorrow he’s going after Beckett.  She will at least listen to him before he’ll even start to accept that they’re over.  Over.  Ha.  He’s not sure they’d ever actually begun.  Still.  He will find her and she _will_ listen.  And then he’ll – what?  Walk away from something that would have been the best thing in his life?  Let her walk away from something that could have been the best in hers?  No.  He won’t force a relationship.  Not now and not ever, because he is not now, and never will be, _that man_.  But he will keep showing up.  Every day.  If that’s all he’s able to do, then he’ll do that.  One way or another, he’ll be her safety line, the one who keeps her from falling off the edge of the cliff.  He’ll save her.  He couldn’t save the others, but he’ll save her.

Shuffle, deal, play.  He’s applying considerable, focused ruthlessness tonight, and it’s paying off in spades.  If someone has a good hand, his is great; if his hand is poor, his bluffs come off and he still wins.  Tonight he doesn’t care that he’s flaying his friends.  He’s intent on winning every last cent round the table, and he doesn’t care if they hate him for it.  When he wins again he smiles, but it’s not the genial, boyish grin they’re used to, it has pointed teeth and sharp edges.

Montgomery is watching Castle from under his eyelids, whenever he thinks Castle’s not paying much attention to him.  He’s never seen the man like this, and from his generally easy-going, happy-go-lucky behaviour in the precinct, he’d have bet against it being possible.  He wonders how badly he’s underestimated Castle in other things.  He considers the discussion he intends to have after the poker’s all done. At this rate, after they’re all three of them bankrupt.  He tipped the wink to the Mayor and the judge that he’ll be staying around a little later, needs a chat with Castle about how he’s portraying the precinct in his book, could they give him a bit of space to do it?  There’d been no problem.

Bob is loosening up under the whiskey.  “Ricky, what’s going on here?  You haven’t lost a hand all evening.”  He grins, man-to-man.  “You know what they say, Ricky, unlucky in love, lucky at cards.  Thinking of that, what have you done with your pretty Detective?  She was here last time, and she’s a lot better to look at than you are.  She plays better cards than we do, too.”

Castle produces a reasonable facsimile of a smile.  “She’s hardly my Detective, Bob” – and he manages not to wince at all as he says it, to Montgomery’s considerable interest –“she’s Roy’s.  She’s on vacation.”

“Well, I sure hope that doesn’t slow up your writing.  I’m looking forward to this new series.”

“Series?  Bob, I’m only on the first one.  Hold your horses.  It might not sell.”  But Castle’s pulled on his cocky, PR face and Bob believes that, not his words.

“Yeah, right, Ricky.  No-one here believes that.”  Montgomery’s penetrating gaze notices a well-shielded tell.  Hmm.  Something’s wrong with Castle’s writing, too.

At the end of the night Castle’s taken everybody’s money and the group disbands.  Montgomery pleads a need for a bathroom and takes his sweet time, till he’s heard the door open and close and the sound of silence behind it.  When he comes out Castle’s leaning on the wall, suddenly very big, and not trying to hide the intimidating edge at all, watching him with a very sardonic smile. 

“Did you think I wouldn’t notice you watching me, Roy?”  Montgomery looks him straight in the eye.

“I’d hoped.  Seems I underestimated you.  You don’t look like this when you’re loafing round the bullpen.  How long’ve you been hiding this?”  Castle shrugs, and doesn’t comment.  He doesn’t drop the aura, either.

“Castle, pour me another, pour yourself another, sit the hell down and listen to me.”  The sardonic smile doesn’t flicker.

“Trying to give me orders in my own home, Roy?  This isn’t the precinct, and I don’t work for you.”

“No, you don’t.  If you did I’d have whupped your ass for stupidity three days ago.  But I’m the man who can make sure you never enter the Twelfth again.  So _sit the hell down and listen to me, Castle_.”

Castle remembers, way back when Montgomery first came to play poker, that he’d thought that Montgomery could turn into the biggest hard-ass he’d ever met.  He hadn’t been wrong.  He’s seeing it now, along with the certain knowledge that Montgomery can and will ban him without a second thought if he thinks it necessary.

“I thought you weaselled your way into my precinct because you wanted to get into Beckett’s pants.  All that shit about a new character was just that.  Bullshit.  Imagine my astonishment when you turned out moderately useful.”

“Stop right there, Roy.”  Castle’s tone is ice-cold.  “I got three hundred pages that aren’t _bullshit_.  Sure, Beckett’s attractive.  But don’t you ever imply I lied about the character.”  Montgomery spreads his hands in a calming gesture.

“I said _I thought_.  I don’t think you lied about the book.  I don’t think I was wrong about Beckett, though.  And I’m not wrong about you being useful.  Now, _shut up and listen_.”  Castle shuts up, though the edge of anger doesn’t noticeably diminish.

“I know you’ve been looking into Beckett’s mom’s case.  I reckon Beckett found out.  I reckon she hasn’t spoken to you since, and now she’s walked out on you.”  His tone would suddenly cut diamond.

“I didn’t let you in so you could send her straight back down that rabbit hole.  I let you in because I thought you’d stop Beckett burning herself out.  If nothing else, you’d be an irritating distraction.  It worked better than I expected, _and_ you turned out useful.”  He pauses, menacingly.  “So what the fuck were you playing at, looking into that case?”

There’s a harsh silence.

“I’d beat some sense into your thick skull, and some answers out of you, but I have to wonder why Ryan and Esposito haven’t done it already.  You hurt her, Castle, and they have to know it was you.  So why aren’t you a bleeding heap in a back alley?”  His tone drops to friendly, just like he uses on suspects before he brings the boom down.  “What aren’t you all telling me?”  Another pause.

“What did you find, Castle?  What did you do?” 

Another long, harsh silence.

“You’ve fucked over my best detective,” Montgomery spits with complete contempt, “and now you’re not even man enough to tell me about it.”  He stands to leave, but somehow Castle’s at the door before him, temper finally snapped.

“Your best detective couldn’t solve her case and was burning out under your nose.  All she did was live in the precinct and what the fuck were you doing about it?  All you saw was your top-of-the-charts solve rate and as long as Beckett did it for you, you couldn’t give a fuck if she spent every hour at work.  You put me in because you didn’t get a choice and don’t tell me you had pure motives.  The hell you did.  It took me five weeks to see what her problem was and you couldn’t do it in ten years. So I set out to solve it, since none of you would help her.”  At which point Montgomery explodes.

“Wouldn’t help her?  You conceited asshole, I pulled her out that rabbit hole the last time round.  I’ve been keeping her out it ever since.  She nearly killed herself searching the first time and you, you arrogant prick, sent her right back into it.”

“You didn’t pull her out it, she _never_ got out it.  If she’d got out it properly she’d have got a life outside the precinct.  Sure I fucked up, but take a good look at yourself in the mirror, Roy, ‘cause from where I’m standing you’re as guilty as me.  At least my motives were to help.”

“Really?  Help?  Help get her pants off, maybe.”  Castle is incandescently furious.

“I didn’t need to get into her mother’s case for that. We’d already” – silence falls as loudly as thunder as he stops dead.

“You’d already what?”

“Got involved.” 

Montgomery’s mouth falls open.  That was not what he’d expected.  Not at all.  He thumps down into a chair.

“What?”  Castle hasn’t moved an inch from where he’s standing.  “You and Beckett?  Well, I’ll be damned.”  Montgomery rises again, picks up the whiskey bottle, pours three fingers into his glass and downs half of it in one.  Then he goes back to the chair.  “I’ll be damned,” he says again, more quietly.  He looks up sharply.  “How’d you keep that quiet?”  The fury of a moment ago is gone.

“Like Beckett’s Little Miss Chatterbox.”

“Mmm.  Not the only one with a closed mouth.  You talk a lot, but you don’t say much, do you?  So now that we’re not going to come to punches, how about you tell me why the boys didn’t beat the crap out you.”

“Because they think I can stop her burning out.”

“Why do they think that?”  Castle shrugs, dismissively.  “Can you?”

“If she lets me in,” Castle says, and much more softly, “If she’d only let me in.”  Montgomery looks carefully at him. 

“You’re in love with her.”


	66. Walking through this world all alone

Castle looks very bleakly at Montgomery.

“That has nothing to do with you.  It’s none of your business how I feel.”  Montgomery ignores him.

“That’s why they haven’t beaten the shit out of you.  That’s why they think you can stop her burning out.  My detectives know exactly what they’re looking at.  Well, _hell_.”  He takes another sizeable mouthful of whiskey, and ponders this new revelation.  It certainly explains a lot about the last three months.  And the last few days.  Looks like they’d started the pool far, far too late.  Hmm.  Unfortunately, that does not, emphatically _not_ , solve the problem.  In fact, it makes it worse.  Oh well.  Let’s see if Castle’s got a clue what to do.  He seems to have done a lot, in a few weeks.

“So what are you going to do about it?”  There’s a brief flash of renewed anger across Castle’s face, before he locks it back down.

“That, _again_ , is none of your business.  You haven’t the right to ask me anything.  And you lost the right to ask anything about Beckett the day you thought you’d fixed it.”  His temper keeps on rising beneath his surface cool, at the smoothly interested look on Montgomery’s face.  “You didn’t fix anything.  I can’t fix her mom’s case, but I can stop her burning out.  Which is a damn sight more than any of you seem to be able to do.” His anger dies away, replaced with hard determination.  “I can stop her falling back into it.”  His next works are bitterly sarcastic, and Montgomery winces under them.  “If, that is, _someone_ doesn’t _make sure I never enter the Twelfth again_.”

Montgomery regards Castle with considerable, unconcealed, and more than slightly impressed interest.  He’d thought, weeks back, that there was more to Castle than met the eye.  Or ear, given how much Castle talks.  In the last couple of hours he’s seen just how much more.  In the last fifteen minutes, he’s realised that for all the easy-going exterior, at core Castle is at least as hard-nosed as any of Montgomery’s team.  He wonders, in an instant of distraction, how, where and most of all _why_ Castle had learned to hide that so well under the charming, careless playboy exterior.

“How?” Montgomery enquires.  He’s fascinated, with the same sort of horrified, sick fascination with which he might regard a snake eating a live mouse, by the idea that even this hard, focused, intimidating Castle can change Beckett’s mind.  And he’s not a little angry, fuelled by guilt that Castle’s read it right and for years he’s read his best detective wrong, that he can’t force anything out of Castle, and doesn’t seem to be able to intimidate him at all.

 _“None of your business.”_   It doesn’t escape Montgomery’s notice that Castle has stopped using his name or rank since his temper had exploded.

“It _is_ my damn business. Beckett was _my_ detective long before _you_ ” – the word is freighted with unpleasant emphasis: it sounds like an expletive –  “came on the scene and she’ll be _my_ detective long after you’ve gone.  Given how you’ve managed to fuck her up so far, I think I’m entitled to know how you plan to fix it.  ‘Cause when you leave, it’s me and my team who’ll have to deal with the fall out.”  Montgomery, as angry as he has been, has picked his phrasing carefully.  He wants, very badly, to see how Castle reacts to the idea that he, Montgomery, assumes that he, Castle, will leave.  He is pretty certain of the reaction he’s provoking.  There is a very short, explosive, silence.  Castle is white with fury, the only colour left in his face his blazing eyes.

“Leave?  Leave?  The only way I’m leaving is if I’m carried out in a box, you asshole.  You think I’m gonna _leave_?”  He just stops himself yelling _I’m not leaving Beckett ever_.  Montgomery hears it, all the same.

“Clearly not,” says Montgomery sardonically, “but you still haven’t mentioned how, _exactly_ ” – there’s some considerable emphasis on that word, as Montgomery is not prepared to see either of Cattle or Beckett arrested, wounded or dead in consequence of this already-a-disaster situation – “you intend to fix this.”  His words fall into the infinite depth of Castle’s frozen fury.  There’s a gaping space of silence, which Montgomery declines to fall into.  Eventually, however, in the face of Castle’s cold refusal to speak, he leaps.

“Get off your high horse, Castle.  You can’t fix this if we don’t help.”  Probably.  Montgomery is neither sure that the previous sentence is true, since he is relatively certain that if they don’t help then one of Castle’s infinite number of _guys he knows_ will, nor that the situation can be fixed.

“Like you’re _helping_ ” – bitterness overwhelms Castle – “now?”

Montgomery raises his eyebrows.  As far as he’s concerned, he _has_ been helping.  Seems like Castle doesn’t agree.  He waits with renewed interest for Castle’s next statement.  “You think you _helped_ by letting Beckett go God-knows-where for a fortnight on her own?  How does it _help_ to let her hide and spend two weeks walling it all up and not dealing with any of it?  You got to here, to this complete fuck-up, because she never _talks_ about anything to anyone and only thinks about murder and doesn’t ask for anything or rely on anyone at all.  So you think it _helps_ ” – the strength of his utter incomprehension could move Manhattan to Madagascar – “ to let her have space to carry on sinking into solitude?  You’re a fool.”

“It’s worked before,” says Montgomery, almost casually.  Castle doesn’t need to know that if he, Castle, doesn’t spend tomorrow on the NY-17 to Cherry Ridge Wild Forest in the Catskills, then sometime in the next day or two he, Montgomery, likely will.  It won’t, in fact, be the first time.  It’s how he’d got her to therapy, all those years ago.  He’s thought, since then, that Beckett was fixed.  Obviously not.  And when she’d started to look overstressed again, and then Castle had fortuitously turned up like a gift-wrapped present on his doorstep, he’d thought that Castle would irritate her sufficiently – or provoke some other emotion, bearing in mind the rest of his effect on her – to snap her out of the possible spiral back down. 

He would far rather Castle went to the cabin than he did.  He, Montgomery, is not at all in a position to take the sorts of actions he suspects that Castle will.  For a start, he can’t lay hands on Beckett to shake some sense into her without risking considerable physical damage and a justified lawsuit.  Unfortunately for Montgomery, Castle, having been brought up short and forced to recognise his own mastery of manipulation as not necessarily a good thing, is perfectly well able to recognise attempts at manipulation from others.  He looks Montgomery straight in the eye.

“Stop dancing round the subject.  If you think I should go up to wherever Godforsaken isolated place she’s gone, _just fucking say so_.  Oh – and you can give me the address too.  You’ve had it in your pocket all evening.  You’ve been tapping it constantly.”

Montgomery holds up both hands in a gesture of apology – or acquiescence – and hands over a slip of paper with a scrawled address.  He looks at Castle carefully, and shakes off the last of his anger.  Some allowance, after all, has to be made for a man in love.

“You wanna tell me when you decided you were going after her?”

“No.  It’s not your business.”  Castle has a thought.  “Don’t you even _think_ of warning her I’m coming.”  Montgomery had no intention of doing that.  He’s not that stupid, whatever Castle may believe.  And since Castle’s doing exactly what Montgomery wants him to, and not incidentally saving Montgomery what is guaranteed to be an unpleasant task – well, possibly saving him, and at least he can put the unpleasantness off - he’s not going to put any barriers in Castle’s path.  No more than there are already, anyway.  The way Castle looks, obstacles wouldn’t have any effect.  Montgomery tips back the remains of his whiskey and stands up.

“You need anything, Castle, you let me know.”  It’s an olive branch, and it’s accepted as such.

“Okay.”  Castle sees Montgomery out, returns to his study and supplies himself with another, small, shot of whiskey.  He won’t take any risk that he’s not fit to drive when he wakes tomorrow.  Ah.  Today.

He drains the whiskey and prepares for bed: for another night of fractured sleep, another night where he’ll reach out and fail to find Beckett – she still can’t be _Kate_ to him, _she_ has to tell him her name, make him free of it – another night where he falls asleep in the miserable knowledge of his failure to save her and wakes to find it perched on the end of the bed waiting for him.

* * *

 

Deep in the Catskills, Beckett had finished her coffee, wiped her face and blown her nose, unpacked and, without any enthusiasm at all, investigated the meagre contents of the fridge.  She’s too tired to get back in the car and go to the store.  She can drink her coffee any way it comes, as long as it’s got copious caffeine.  It’s just as well there’s no alcohol, though.  She’d had enough of that last night, and she doesn’t need to dissolve her stomach lining by another round of strong drink on an empty gut.  She realises she’s exhausted, and trails miserably to her bedroom, Kindle in hand.  She’ll read, until she falls asleep. 

Maybe tomorrow will be better.  No temptation, no archives, no records, no reminders.  She’d stripped every possible reminder from the cabin when her father started to drown his grief in Jack Daniels; boxed them up and put them away.  Right now, she’s glad she did, though at the time she’d wept over every item, sobbed as she packed every memento.  She can shake this resurrected need to freefall right back in without a parachute.  She just needs time on her own to lock it back down.  This time, she won’t be listening if Montgomery turns up.  She doesn’t need more therapy.  She only needs more time.

She absolutely doesn’t think about the other reason for her drowning misery.  Not, at least, until she undresses to get ready for bed and realises that she’s wearing a lingerie set which Castle had appreciated slowly, seductively and in all the ways she likes – _liked –_ best.  She rams them into the laundry basket where she can’t see them and takes a shower so that the water pouring down her face can be adequately, acceptably, explained.  It’s hard to maintain that fiction after she’s stepped back out and the water’s still there.

It’s been almost a week, and the comforting lies are no more comforting and no less lies than the very first minute it had all collapsed around her and she’d reached for them.  She’d really believed that there was something there, something more, deeper; something good.  Instead, it’s just another fucked-up mess in the disaster zone of her private life.  Just like always.  Safer, she thinks, to stick to the dead.

Sleep comes hard, despite her exhaustion, reluctant to arrive, more reluctant to stay, and then, contrarily, reluctant to depart.  She doesn’t fall asleep till well past midnight, and then she wakes frequently till close to dawn.  Finally, true, deep sleep overtakes her.

She wakes screaming.

Her edgy, darker dreams arrived to haunt her, but this time none of it’s consensual.  She’s trapped, tied down; no matter how she pleads to be released, no matter how often she says her safe word, it doesn’t work.  She can’t see who’s imprisoned her: it’s back to the sightless dreams of the nights before Castle had muscled into her life, made her believe he could be trusted, made her believe that she could at last have a real relationship – and then yanked it all away in four devastating words: _it’s about your mother_.

It takes her several minutes to stop shaking and to regulate her heartbeat and breathing; then to realise that she’s soaked in sweat and the bedclothes are untucked and twisted round her; to sense that her pillow is sodden.  It’s past ten when she staggers to the shower; it’s nearly eleven by the time she’s changed the bed and put the laundry on and hung the innards of the pillow out to dry; and finally made herself a potful of strong black coffee.

She sits outside to drink it, and try to forget the shattering terror of her nightmare in the bright summer sun.  Eventually the coffee is done and the hot sunlight has seeped into her shoulders sufficiently that she can collect her thoughts and depart for the local store.  She may not be hungry, but she needs food and she needs milk, and coffee.  She is also, after last night, very seriously considering a packet of sleeping pills from the town pharmacy.  She normally despises that sort of concession, hasn’t considered it as a solution since Stanford, but as she shudders from the not-faded memory she thinks that this one time it might be sensible.  She leaves for town with enough of a sense of purpose to squash down her misery, and returns before lunchtime with everything she needs.

A swift lunch later, Beckett puts the rest of her laundry on the line to dry, out of sight of the driveway – no road to the cabin; you have to know exactly where you’re going to be able to find it – and, armed with a smallish backpack containing a rug, some water, a flashlight, a snack and her Kindle; her gun on its accustomed place on her hip, takes off into the forest, aiming for a specific destination.  She doesn’t bother locking the cabin, even leaves her car keys on the hook in the kitchen.  No-one’s going to find it, and it’s not likely that a passing deer will be able to open the door.  Though you never know.  If she finds a Bigfoot at her table sipping her coffee and eating her cookies, she’ll know she made a mistake.  But then that thought reminds her of Castle and his insane theories and then she’s hurt and mad and desperately, heartbrokenly miserable all over again.  She’s half a mile into the forest before she stops dabbing her eyes.  It’s another half mile of fierce concentration on her route and footing before she’s re-constituted her cold, indifferent shell.  She can get past this.  She’s done it every time before.  Broken hearts heal, given time.

She can always turn to the job to soothe the pain of a broken heart.  It’s always worked before.  (She doesn’t think that it’s never hurt this much before.)  Two weeks here, to let the agony fade, to block it off, to reacquire the sound of silence in her mind.  Under it all, her heart beats out its old rhythm: _don’t care, caring only hurts_. 

It occurs to her that someone she knows must have shown Castle the case file: that being the way he had seen it, had had the crime scene and autopsy photos.  One of her team must have given him it.  Just another betrayal, in an adult lifetime composed entirely of betrayals.  It doesn’t matter who, though there are only three candidates, because she only needs to know that at core, she can’t trust anyone with her private life.  Just another reason not to get involved with people, to stick to the dead.  Her feet tramp on, crushing her emotions as the grass beneath each stride.  She’s quite deliberately pushing everyone and everything away from her.  _Stick to the dead, Kate._   _They can’t hurt you_.  Only the living can do that.  She plods on.

After an hour or so, at no particular pace, she’s reached her destination.  She shakes out her rug and lies down, sprawled on her stomach, facing the lake her father used to fish in, her water within reach.  She reads for a while, not a murder mystery, not a heavyweight Russian novel, and emphatically not a romance; but an old, old favourite: _Three Men in a Boat_.  No triggers.  No memories.  Peaceful, restful, and only dealing in trivialities and gentle humour.  The words float in front of her in the heat, and she puts her head down just for a moment.

* * *

 

Castle wakes later than he’d wanted to in the morning, and by the time he’s dressed and packed it’s past eleven.  It’s done him good, though: he’s slept better than any night since Beckett walked away from him.  He’s got a plan, he’s got the support of everyone who matters at the precinct, and for the first time in three months he knows where he’s going.  Literally and metaphorically.  All he has to do – _all?_ Ha – is convince _his_ Beckett to turn around and come back to him.  He’ll think about _how_ en route.  Thinking of which, he’d better find out the route, and then he’d better hire some unassuming, unidentifiable car.  A scarlet Ferrari is hardly unobtrusive, and he’s perfectly certain that if Beckett spots it she’ll disappear again.  If she does that, this time, _no-one_ will know where she’ll have gone.  Though as long as it’s got cell service, the boys can locate her.  Still, he can hardly arrest her and bring her home in handcuffs.  (It would be insanely hot.  _If_ it were consensual.  The tiny pitch black portion of his mind that thinks hateful pitch black thoughts wants to do it anyway.  He rams it back into its cage.)

He tries to work out a route.  The first bit is easy.  Take the NY17-W to Liberty.  After that, it’s surprisingly difficult.  In fact, it seems very like the Beckett cabin falls foursquare into the category of only findable if you’ve already been.  The best plan seems to be to get to Liberty, then to Roscoe, and then ask some handy, bucolically helpful storekeeper for directions.  He can always use the GPS on his phone, too.  _If_ there’s cell coverage.

His mother is missing, which is helpful.  Alexis is unlikely to call from camp, but if she does she’ll ring his cell anyway.  He leaves a short, cheerful note for his mother, saying that he’ll be away for up to a week or two, which he has occasionally done beforetimes when Alexis is in camp, and leaves to collect his unobtrusive hire car carrying a small bag of necessary clothes and wash kit, and his laptop.

* * *

 

Beckett wakes slightly chilled, and realises with some surprise that it’s early evening – and she still has an hour’s hike to reach home.  She stretches, working out the kinks from sleeping on the ground – she must have been far more tired than she knew – and rapidly packs up, makes sure she’s left no trash, and gets moving.  She’ll need to hustle: even if she does have a flashlight she doesn’t want to be walking too far in the dark, alone.  She likes streetlights, for walking.  She prefers looking at the starlight from the porch of the cabin.

As she walks she thinks.  Her sleep had been thankfully dreamless, and she feels somewhat soothed and calmer in consequence.  Maybe she’ll come back out here tomorrow.  Maybe, even, search out their small tent and sleep out a couple of nights: let the chirping of the crickets and the soft susurration of the wind in the trees lull her to sleep, let the gentle breeze over the surface of the lake blow the misery from her mind.  The calm, repetitive natural noises will help her hypnotise herself back to how she used to be.  No muss, no fuss.  No feelings.  She sniffs, and wipes her eyes.

Twilight has fallen as she reaches the cabin, and she needs her flashlight for the last part, as night falls.  The gathering dark speeds her steps and leaves her a little nervy; the soft noises of the forest no longer wholly soothing.  She goes round to collect in her laundry, perfectly dry, and then dumps the basket on the kitchen table with relief, clicks on the light, followed by switching on the kettle.  She needs a coffee.  The walk back must have set her instincts on edge, because she can’t help feeling that something’s slightly off.  She shrugs the feeling away and gets out a mug.

“I’ll have one too, please.”


	67. It's too late to say you're sorry

Castle had driven up at a precisely legal pace in his hire car, mainly because he’s sure it couldn’t go any faster without shaking apart.  He’d made Liberty by two, stopped for a late lunch, and gone on to Roscoe.  After that, things had got... well, complicated.  He’d hoped for a general store, but the teen behind the till hadn’t appeared to know his own name, let alone be able to give directions.  It had taken him three more stores before he’d got lucky at the fly fishing lot.  Turns out that Beckett’s father was a keen fisherman, and turns out more that the owner is pals with him.  A certain amount of bluff conversation and not a little bluffing later, and the owner is telling Castle all about little Katie and how cute she was and they don’t see her much now she’s all grown up and a cop in the big city and it’s really nice that he’s come up to see her because it gets lonely out there in the forest.  The owner provides detailed and comprehensive directions, with sketches, and even invites Castle to try a cast or two.  He declines, politely and charmingly, on the grounds of incompetence.  The only thing he’s ever fished for is information, and he’s exceptionally good at that.

On the long drive up he’s also started to think; something he might usefully have done four days ago.  Beckett shuts down when she’s unhappy, runs away.  If she really didn’t care, she’d not have taken vacation.  It fits her story, her pattern.  So, if she’s unhappy, like Ryan had said, she cared.  Far more than she’d been letting on.  He thinks further.  _I thought I could trust you_ , she’d said: though he’s still sure he shouldn’t have heard it. 

Trust.  Hmmm.  Couldn’t trust Sorenson, couldn’t rely on her father.  Trusts her team, on the job.  Doesn’t socialise much, out of it – conclusion: doesn’t trust anyone to be a friend, except maybe Lanie.  Oh.  Oh  _no_ .  He’d seen it in her eyes, at the beginning of the most recent case.  She’d trusted him.  They’d been becoming  _friends_ , as well as lovers.  She’d trusted that he’d stay out of her life: she’d said  _let me do it in my own time_ ; he’d  _known_ that part of the reason she’d ditched Sorenson was because he’d treated her like a victim; he’d spent weeks proving that he didn’t interfere with her cases and could do what was best for the investigation. 

If he’d only waited for her to catch up with her own feelings, rather than proving – in her eyes - that he couldn’t, wouldn’t, let her make her own decisions; that he thought of her as a victim, only as somebody who needed help. 

During, and then after, that kidnap case, there’d been a noticeable change in how she’d thought of him.  Looking back now, it’s clear that trust in his behaviour, in and out of bed, had been shifting to something much deeper.  She’d asked him to stay, even, asked him for something: this woman who never seemed to ask for anything.  After that last night, and the morning after, it had all been different.  He realises, right there on the highway, that she’d been making up her mind, that she’d come to a decision that night, or at latest the next morning.  If he hadn’t pushed her too hard, too fast, too soon: if he hadn’t interfered; if he’d only waited - he thinks she would have told him it all.  But he did, and it’s done, and even if he’d had at best mixed motives in the beginning he’d decided simply to give her the information and let her decide, by the end.

And now he has to try to explain when she’s spent almost a week walling off everything and everyone and doing her utmost, viciously, to drive him out.  She hadn’t even spent time with Lanie.  He takes it slow up the back roads to the cabin, bumping over the rough surface.  He’s decided what he’s going to do: the only way that’s worked for him with Beckett: bulldoze his way right through her barriers and make her listen.  And only the shock of physical contact has ever got him anywhere past her barriers anyway.  If he has to hold her in place to make it happen, well, at the minute any possibility of re-establishing a relationship is utterly fucked anyway, so one more shattering fight can’t make it worse.  He can’t let her shut him out.  He’ll never be let back in.  Almost a week of watching her freeze him off is more than enough.  She is not going to dictate the terms of a forced end to this relationship.  Sure, she’s got the right to say no, but she’s not going to get to say that till he’s had a chance to have his say.

He has to convince her of the truth of how he feels, of how much he needs her, how much he wants her.  How much, already; how much he loves her.  He never expected to find love, back when he first saw her; he never expected to find salvation.  He’s found both, and he has no intention of losing either.  He _will not_ fail.  He’ll never taste failure again.   He’d promised himself he’d never fail, back when he was still a child, watching his mother struggle to bring him up, watching himself fail to save her from the harshness of their life, or the ingénues.  He won’t fail himself, or Beckett.  He’d promised himself that, too.

He never breaks his promises.  If only he were confident that that could continue.

He rattles over ruts and bumps, slower and slower, carefully studying the sketched directions that the fisherman had given him, counting turns and then yards.  Eventually he comes to a cabin, deep in the forest.  He parks a little way away, where the car won’t be instantly obvious, and walks back and circuits the building.  There’s her car, there’s washing behind the house, drying on a line.  He recognises certain items immediately.  He’s in the right place.

Without much hope, he knocks on the door, and receives no answer.  Unsurprised, but nevertheless frustrated at the absence of response, he then tries the door, and is astonished to find it unlocked.  Clearly he’s not in Kansas – or Manhattan – now, Toto.  The last thing he’d expected would have been for Beckett to leave her home unsecured.  He decides that it’s a sign that the universe is on his side, opens the door and walks in, as if he had a right to.  He conducts a brief investigation of the cabin, and finds no Beckett, but all the small signs of Beckett in residence.  He’ll wait here, till she returns.

He makes himself comfortable in the main room, out of sight of the door, pulls out his laptop, connects it to a socket and starts to write.  He feels inspiration start to flow again, now that he’s made up his mind.  Well.  He’d done that some time ago.  Now that he’s realised where he stands.  He keeps writing, words pouring out on to the page.

Some considerable time later he starts to realise that it’s drawing into evening and the light is starting to fade.  Beckett still hasn’t appeared.  That’s a little… oh.  He’s worried about her.  Specifically, he’s worried not that she’ll run into unexpected trouble – he’s sure she’s got her gun, she almost never seems to leave it behind: in fact he can only remember that happening once – but that she’s gone out looking for oblivion.  His mind is filled with visions of Beckett taking her father’s route.  Surely, though, she wouldn’t?  Surely not?  He wishes he were more certain of that.  He knows how strong she is.  He also knows that even the strongest tower can fall, if pushed hard enough.  God knows, she’s been pushed past anyone else’s limits.

He sits in the gathering gloom, laptop forgotten, closed, and story abandoned, and wishes he knew better how to do this; how to regain a relationship when he hasn’t had a proper one in too many years; how to keep the woman he loves; how to show her that caring isn’t control.  How to be her safety line, her rheostat; how to stop her from flaming out.  How to show her he’s what she needs.  How to show her he loves her, and make her believe him, and take them back to solid ground.  First, though, he has to make her listen.  If she returns.  It’s almost full dark now, and his worry is unabated.

He sees a small patch of light, hears the rustle of fabric and deduces that laundry is being taken down.  He’s enormously relieved: even if she’s perfectly capable of protecting herself from all external forces he wasn’t entirely sure that she wouldn’t have sought her own form of oblivion.  The door opens, shuts again.  There’s a soft thump and the kitchen light goes on.  Water runs, there’s a click – must be a kettle, Beckett’s coffee habit undiminished by her retreat from civilisation – and the sounds of crockery.  Time to announce his presence.

“I’ll have one too, please.”

Beckett shrieks.  He’s never heard a noise like it from her.  And then, without a pause, her gun is up and pointed right at his chest.

“Hands on your head.”

“Beckett, it’s me.”  There’s a very short silence.  It’s not welcoming.

“Hands on your head,” she repeats.  She either hasn’t registered that it’s he, or she’s pretending she hasn’t.  He puts his hands on his head.  If she really hasn’t recognised him, he doesn’t particularly want to be shot.  “Take one step forward into the light.”  He complies.  There’s a very sharp indrawn breath, and the cold, focused cop stare down the barrel of her Glock is replaced by chill indifference.  Though it had flickered, lightning quick, through other expressions, which certainly had not been indifference.  She holsters her gun and turns away, paying him less attention than she does the moth that’s flapping round the light, and finishes making herself a coffee.

She’d thought it was a burglar, or a hobo, and reacted automatically, though she’s really not proud of the shriek.  It wasn’t until he’d come into the light that she’d been sure it was Castle.  She’d have preferred a Bigfoot.  She pulls on complete indifference and turns away to compose herself before she has to speak.  She won’t betray the slightest hint of uncertainty, when she tells him to leave.  There’s no reason for him to have come, he’s just breaking her heart all over again.  She doesn’t want to hear his reasoning.  How did he know the way anyway?  Well, who cares?  Certainly not she.   He can drive all the way back to Manhattan, because she has absolutely no interest in anything he might say.  She doesn’t care.  She can’t afford to care.  He can’t be trusted, just like all the others.  And she really wishes he hadn’t come, because she’d just started to build up her defences against everything again and he’s sapping them simply by showing up.

“Leave, please,” she says coolly, freezing her treacherous feelings (underneath her feelings scream _he came he came; listen to him_ ) in the chill of the words.  She turns around and finds him regarding her carefully.  She ignores it.  He’s not worth her attention.  He’s _not_.  She fusses with her backpack and finds her Kindle, leaves the rest of its contents for the morning and takes her coffee and her Kindle out to the porch, under its light.  Castle follows, looming behind her.  Beckett recognises the Castle who doesn’t trouble to conceal his underlying determination, and feels unpleasant tension rising up her spine and cramping in her shoulders and neck.  Unconsciously, she shifts subtly into a defence-ready mindset and posture, puts her mug and Kindle down to free her hands.

When nothing happens she sits down, turns her back and concentrates on her book.  There’s a tense silence, which stretches out unbroken into the dark woods around the clearing in which the cabin stands.  After a short while, when Beckett’s finished her coffee far faster than usual and read no more than two pages of her book, she stands up and pretends to notice that Castle’s still leaning in the kitchen doorway.

“Leave.  Wherever your car is, find it and go.  Please.”  It’s completely flat, no intonation or emotion at all.

“No.”  Castle’s tired of the game.  He’s going to stay until they _have_ this conversation, and Beckett is going to participate in it.  “I came to talk to you.  Since you wouldn’t listen back in New York.”  That’s got bite.

“Nothing you could say worth listening to.”  Beckett’s mouth pinches shut, as if she can’t even be bothered to say _leave_ again.

“Plenty to say.  I’m not going till you’ve heard me.”  He doesn’t say _and you can’t make me leave_.  She looks up at him, the same dead, uninterested eyes that are all he’s seen since Tuesday.  But without his own misery dimming his perceptions, he sees her acute pain behind the act.

“Move,” she says, dully, flatly.  When he doesn’t, she pushes past anyway, and sets her mug by the sink.  He doesn’t try to stop her, as long as she’s inside.  He tamps down the insistent urge simply to pull her into his arms and keep kissing her, holding her, comforting her till she acknowledges that she needs him, and then accepts that she’s his and he is, likewise, hers.  She’s partway up the stairs when he speaks again.

“You can’t keep running, Beckett.  We can talk now, or we can talk in the morning, or we can talk next week for all I care, but I’m not leaving wherever you are till you’ve listened to me.  You don’t _get_ to shut me out without hearing me.”  He doesn’t say – but he so badly wants to – _you don’t get to leave me without hearing that I love you._   She continues up the stairs as if he’d never spoken a word.  Shortly he hears the shower running.  He has a sudden thought, and takes quiet, and completely unjustifiable, possession of her car keys.  Beckett will undoubtedly wake before him, and while if she goes out on foot that’s one thing, if she leaves in the car he’ll have this all to do again.  While he knows he has absolutely no right to take them, he’s also absolutely determined that her habit of simply running from him, and from herself, ends here.

Beckett forces herself into the shower, where any sounds she might inadvertently make are overwhelmed by the sound of running water, and tries very hard not to think.  It doesn’t work at all.  Not that her thinking achieves anything.  The grindstone of her thoughts is circling on a spindle of _why is he here_ and grinding out a constant stream of _go away, I don’t want to hear it_.  The millwheel of her feelings is spinning on a completely different rhythm of _he cares enough to come after me_.  She ignores her feelings.  Seeing him only hurts.  She can’t trust him. He just needs to leave and let her mend her heart in peace and solitude and silence.  There’s nothing he’s going to say that would be able to fix this, so he needn’t even try.  If she just lets him have his say, she tells herself, he’ll go away, when it makes no difference, when he finally gets it through his thick head that she doesn’t care.  She feels the slow pool of tears giving her back her own lie.  She doesn’t only _care_.  It is – it _was, was_ , there is no _is_ – far more than that.

She repairs to her room and buries her weeping in her pillows.  She won’t admit her misery.  He’ll only try to fix it, and he can’t.  He’s just as bad as the others.  She forcibly stops her crying and turns to her book, reading with determination not to let anything other than the story intrude on her thoughts until, far too late, she switches out her light and tries to sleep.

Castle has padded round the ground floor to find the bedroom that he’d noticed earlier.  It’s clearly a guest room, and in the small closet he finds a pillow and some bed linen, of which he takes swift advantage.  He might as well sleep relatively comfortably.  Convincing Beckett of his trustworthiness is liable to be extremely uncomfortable.  Especially as he thinks, based on the evidence only of the previous hour, that he will have to take extreme measures to make her stay still long enough to listen.  He flashes back to the previous occasions on which he’s managed to make her hear him when she’s fled from her own feelings.  He’s only done it by hanging on to her: she’s only listened when he’s held her close.  He remembers how it feels to have her close, and drifts into sleep with the sensory memory of Beckett close against him to float him into pleasurable dreams.

Something wrenches him out of sleep: from the moonlight it’s still full night.  He sits upright, listening hard.  There’s nothing there: it must have been some branch falling outside.  He slides back down under the thin comforter and begins to drift off again when a scream slices through the silence.  He’s halfway up the stairs before his brain has connected with his instincts.  Fortunately brain and instincts are, for once, on the same page.  Get to Beckett and stop whatever is causing that _noise_ , however he can.

The single scream is not repeated before he comes crashing through her bedroom door and slams to a halt mere inches before he hits her bed.  He switches on a sidelight and rapidly surveys this scene of devastation.  Beckett’s tangled into her sheet, eyes shut, the tracks of tears trailing down her face and her forehead and collarbones slick with sweat, frantically struggling with the fabric.  Well, he can fix that.  He rips it away from her to free her limbs.  It doesn’t seem to help much.  He can see her lips moving but can’t make out the words.  Lip reading is a skill that had – he presently regrets bitterly – passed him by.  Not many deaf people in the theatre business. 

She’s not calming at all, even though the sheet’s not restraining her any more and her sloppy sleep tee is loose around her.  He assesses the available options - all two of them.  Leave her to it or hold her close.  Which is really only one option.  There is no way he’s leaving her to suffer this alone.  And if that decision is affected by his blinding need to hold on to her, he’s not going to admit it.  She needs him, whether she likes it or not: he’ll exorcise whatever demon is possessing her.

He starts carefully, not even sitting on the edge of her bed but kneeling beside it: a hand lightly on her shoulder.  When that doesn’t make matters worse (which he had feared) he essays a stroke down her back, wholly asexual for the first time ever; when that also succeeds, he dares to seat himself beside her, watching over her like some mediaeval knight at vigil, hand on her waist rather than on a sword.  Perhaps there’s not that much difference, he thinks, and turns off the light to sit in the dark.  Some while later, he lies down next to her and drapes his arm about her, warmth without confinement.  It takes effort not to pull her in and hold her there against him, where she should be, where she will be again, where he can comfort her.

But that’s when it all blows up.  No sooner has he put his arm about her than she starts to struggle, begins to whimper painfully and then cry out.  This time the words are clear.  _Stop, let me go_ , and then, appallingly, _cinnamon_.  He lifts his arm as if she’d burned him, and then slides off the bed so there’s no risk he’s touching her, and none of it helps at all.  So he takes the nuclear option and shakes her awake, ignoring how she fights under his hands on her shoulders.  He has to break her out of this nightmare, and however much she fights him now it’s a small evil to a much greater good.  He’ll deal with whatever she flings at him (punches seem quite likely) when she’s not locked into the dream. He keeps going until her eyes open fully and focus on his face.

The last thing he expected was for her to go completely limp.


	68. Cold doesn't bother me anyway

This is Beckett.  Beckett doesn’t do this.  Beckett doesn’t break.

Until he broke her.  Until he played the hero and broke her.  Until he followed her here to try to put her together again and it seems he’s broken her again.  How many times can he accidentally break his favourite thing before he’s not allowed to play with her any more?  ( _I didn’t mean to break it, mommy.  I’m sorry.  I’m so sorry._   That time, it had only been a vase.  He’d spent hours trying to repair it.  He has the sinking feeling that this might be a little more difficult. _)_

But.  But maybe she needs to break.  Maybe she needs to break and put herself back together differently.  Maybe she’s spent so much time not breaking – ten years of not breaking – that she’s forgotten how to bend, too.  He’s come so far, another risk isn’t going to matter.  He picks her up, dead weight, and carries her downstairs, cradled against him, her words convincing him that it’s too much of a risk to stay on a bed; lays her out on the couch and then, small triviality, goes and puts the kettle on, returns to switch on a dimmed sidelight, and then brings her back into his lap and his loose, gentle embrace until she should wake.  She belongs right here, safe and protected from her own demons.  He sits, perfectly content with this position, and waits, petting her gently and murmuring soothingly:  _It’s all right, Kate.  I’m here.  It’s all right_ .  He can call her Kate, when she can’t hear.

Finally, the terrifying limpness dissipates and is replaced by the same bone deep tension he remembers from a darkened gym, or her bedroom, remembers as having followed every shattering row.  He holds her a little tighter, not petting now, and waits some more.  He can outwait her.  He has to, and he will, because it’s for her to start.  He has to be in control of himself for any discussion, because it’s the only way he can bring them both safely out of the darkness.  And so he waits, still and silent: stalking the truth.

Beckett rises up out of nightmare, sees Castle’s face where her dream-tormentor would have been, had there been vision - and simply lets go of the world, unable, in the aftershock, to separate Castle from the nightmare.  She doesn’t expect, when she comes back to herself, to be tucked into Castle.  (She can’t have fainted.  She never faints.  Fainting is for wusses and wimps and definitely not for NYPD detectives.  Unfortunately she has to face reality.  She’s lost the time between nightmare, waking and now.)  Clawing, biting tension instantly takes up residence in her body.  Castle tightens his arms around her and it’s an effort not to fight him off as she’d tried to fight in the dream.  She won’t show her weakness: how badly she’s been shaken by it. 

She doesn’t, she reminds herself, need to be afraid of Castle.  She hopes that she doesn’t need to be afraid of Castle.  Because here and now she hasn’t a hope in hell of taking him down if required.  She couldn’t manage it fully fit and prepared.  She’s not going to manage it when she’s still careering down the adrenaline crash, wired so tightly she could be used for chain link fencing at Rikers, and – she abruptly realises – she hasn’t eaten since lunch yesterday and her blood sugar is through the floor and heading for China.  In summary, she couldn’t take down a tethered rabbit right now.  But she can’t trust Castle, either.

She can’t trust him.  But she can still trust some things about him.  And one of those is that he’ll stop.  Whatever he’s doing, if she says _stop_ he will not in any way at all force her to do anything she doesn’t want to do.  Physically.  Mentally – that is, talking – is likely to be a very different matter.  A certain amount of tension drains, though by no means all.  She recovers a little more common sense.  This is not her dream.  _Castle_ is not the man in her dream.  It was only, merely, a dream, not some repressed memory.  But it had still been a hell of a nightmare.  She shudders, and finds herself clasped yet closer.  Castle has never made any secret of the fact that he’s much bigger, broader and stronger than she, and right now he’s directing all of that; quite consciously, she is sure; into the protective, possessive hold that he’s applied to her at intervals, whenever he’s been given half a chance, since the very beginning. 

She very badly wishes that she could simply relax into it, let him cosset and pet her and then she could believe that it would all be okay; let him take away the nightmare and soothe her back to sleep.  All she’d have to do is curl in close – and, of course, forget that he couldn’t be trusted with anything that involves her life outside the precinct or outside her job as a cop.  She stiffens up again.  Castle’s reaction to that is to try to tuck her head into his broad shoulder and stroke soothingly over her back.  No.  No.  She’s not _going_ to be tucked into his lap and cuddled and enticed into thinking he means something to her when he _doesn’t_ and he never did.  She doesn’t mean that much to him.  She feels the tears, and the lies, prickling at the back of her eyes.

“Let go.  Please.”  She’s not going to struggle away from him like she’s some pathetic victim.  She doesn’t need to do that.  _Dignified indifference_ , that’s what she needs.  She’d read that phrase, once, in a funny little book translated from Italian on a stopover in London.  Don Camillo, that was it.  It’s the sort of story Castle would have appreciated.  She stops that thought cold and dead in its tracks. 

“Are you sure that’s what you want?”  She doesn’t need the softly comforting tone or the velvet voice.  She really does not need him at all.  ( _Liar_ , says the voice in her head.)  She needs her boundaries and her barriers and she’ll be just fine in a fortnight.  Or at least be able to fake it, hide her feelings, sufficiently to get through work.  Since there won’t be anything else except work to think about, it’ll be okay.

“Let me go.”  Castle drops his arms.  It’s no part of his current plans to let, or make, Beckett think that he won’t stop if she asks.  The middle of the night, with neither of them dressed, (and that is really _not_ a helpful thought) is not the time and place to force this discussion, though for a moment he’d hoped that she might relax sufficiently to begin.  It’s rather interesting that she hasn’t answered the question, though.  It’s even more interesting that her voice isn’t wholly steady.  Very, very nearly – but not quite.  And it’s absolutely _fascinating_ that she hasn’t actually stood up yet, or moved off his lap in any way.  He’d expected her to take off like a scalded cat.  He wouldn’t at all mind being able to see her face right now.  He’s fairly sure of what he’d find, and he doesn’t think that the emotion he’d find would be anger.  Nor, unfortunately, desire.  He waits a little longer, to see what will happen.  Or what won’t.

Having told Castle to let her go, and found, to well-concealed relief, that he does, Beckett is struggling with two conflicting, but equally strong, desires.  One is to get the hell out of Dodge, aka Castle’s lap, before her _feelings_ overcome her thinking and her sense and she cuddles right into him and lets him take all the pain away.  The other is not to let him see her face.   Dignified indifference is not, she knows, what’s written across it.  She wishes she’d still got long hair.  Damned if she does move, damned if she doesn’t.  She bites the bullet and starts to stand up.

And that’s when Castle decides that he’s had enough of not seeing Beckett’s face.  She’s got halfway up, resolutely turned away from him, when he clamps both large hands round her waist, hoists her to her feet with as little effort as he’d use for Alexis, and turns her to face him full-on.  It’s precisely as he thought.   He lets go of her, meets her eyes squarely – and resists the hardwired urge to pull her right back down again and not let her go till she’s cried herself better – and then prove himself to her until she can have no doubt left in her mind that he’s hers and she’s his and that she should never doubt him again.  But now is not the time.  _Patience, Rick.  Wait for the right time._   He’ll decipher her expression in a moment, when she’s gone.  He knows she’ll go, it’s there in every flicker of her eyes.  And sure enough she’s on the stairs, surefooted in the gloom, and then he hears the decisive click of her bedroom door closing, and then further the well-known sound of upset female hitting the pillows.  It would have been a perfectly acted exit, if it hadn’t been for the emission of a very stifled sniff before she’d shut the door.

He turns out the light and repairs to the guest room in the thin almost-light of pre-dawn.  Halfway there he has another thought.  He prowls softly back to the kitchen and considers very seriously adding the door keys to his haul of purloined items, only just managing to stop himself.  He doesn’t want Beckett to go anywhere, to remove herself from the vicinity, until he’s awake.  He’d take the other solution: go and join her in her room - and he wants to take that primitive, caveman option, has done since she’d pointed her gun at him, wants simply to kiss her and possess her and shatter all this resistance on the hard rock of explosive physical desire; but however good that would be for a very short while, it’s not _enough_ , and it’s not a solution.  She has to decide to come back to him for real, for good, for ever; not just out of physical desire.  And having seen the tears puddling behind her eyes, and her complete failure to preserve a dignified indifference – where _has_ he heard or read that phrase before? – he’s perfectly, beautifully certain that she feels vastly more for him than she’s admitting.  But she will admit it.  They will both admit how much they each feel.

He lies back and stares at the ceiling, listening for any further serious distress, mainly considering Beckett’s reactions and expressions.  In the morning, he’ll find out what her nightmare was.  In the morning, it’ll be time to talk.  He sets the alarm on his phone in the – probably vain – hope that he will wake before Beckett – she _will_ be Kate, soon – in which case he’ll replace the car keys before she notices.  Not that he cares if she notices, because he is absolutely _done_ with watching her find fifty ways to leave her lover.  Fifty thousand ways to run away and hide.  He plunges into sleep to escape that thought.

Beckett is doing precisely what Castle had surmised, smothering her misery in her pillows.  Actually having to see Castle at close quarters, without the dampening effects and distractions of the precinct, is doing nothing for her walls and composure. 

But.  She can’t trust him to let her manage her own life.  She’d told him not to touch her mother’s case, and he’d gone right ahead to look into it straight after she’d said that.  Everything else, every wave of feeling, breaks on that cliff face.  She can’t think why he should have done that: suddenly, blatantly ignore her wishes and do something he knew would mean that they were done; that had ensured they were done, after spending weeks proving he wouldn’t interfere – and then followed her here.  She can’t reconcile those two irreconcilable facts, and she won’t try.  She never has given second chances, when it comes to trust. 

She searches restlessly for sleep and fails to find it till after dawn.  It’s made worse because she knows that if she sought out Castle and curled in beside him sleep would be instant, and dreamless, and comforting.  She’s far too wrung out even to try to think why that should still be so.

* * *

 

When Castle wakes, the cabin is still and silent.  He washes, shaves and dresses rapidly, returns the car keys to their place and makes himself coffee, carefully sitting close enough to the door that anyone – Beckett, for example – trying to leave will be within reach.  More accurately: will be stopped.  They are going to _have_ this conversation, even if he has to hold her in place physically to do it.   He has some ideas about the value of holding her, too.  Shame that none of them are conducive to _talking_ , and therefore right out of court for now.   It would be so much more sensible – and much less stressful – if Beckett would only sit down and talk like any normal human being.

Caffeine begins to have its normal kick-start effect on Castle and intelligence starts to dawn.  He retrieves yesterday’s insight.  Put bluntly, Beckett gets hurt, runs away to lick her wounds alone, blocks off whatever hurt her and never mentions it again.  What she doesn’t do is deal with it.  She simply ignores the defeat and moves on to the next fight.  All she’s ever learned is to fight the same fight harder, raise the same defences more strongly.  He’d said it, though, weeks ago.  _When the fighting’s over I’ll still be here_.  And here he still is.

So think, then, Castle.  She’s already convinced herself that he can’t be trusted, without even hearing him out, but she’s choking on the conflict between her thoughts and her feelings.  The swift flick of expression when she realised it was he and not some lowlife had looked very much like – delight?  But that had been chased by utter misery, and as swiftly pursued by cold indifference.  Still, first impressions are mightily revealing.  He can work with delight, and misery.  It’s indifference that causes problems.  He sips his coffee and stares into the distance, searching for the right words to bring down her barriers.

He hears the soft noises of Beckett rising and eventually arriving in the kitchen in search of coffee.  She doesn’t look pleased to see Castle.

“What are you still doing here?”  This morning, she’s actively hostile.  If he doesn’t leave soon, all her intentions and re-establishment of her protective shell and barriers will be undone, so she’s going to do her utmost to make him go.  However much it hurts her.  “I don’t want you here.”

“I told you, I’m not going anywhere until you listen to me.”  And since this situation is still totally fucked up and he can’t be in any worse position than he already is, he carries on.  “And neither are you.  You are going to listen whether you like it or not.”  Beckett looks as if she couldn’t care less.  She’s still standing at the table, empty-handed, empty-eyed.

“I don’t have to listen to you.  This is my house.  I want you out it.  There’s nothing you can say that would make the slightest difference.  I can’t trust you and I never want to see you again.  We are done.  Now leave.”  No emotion, no anger, nothing.

“No.  I’m not leaving till you hear me out.”

“More manipulation?  How many more lies are you going to tell me?”

“I didn’t lie to you.”  He dives in.  “I started looking at your mother’s case weeks before you ever said not to.  By the time you said not to it was already done.  I could have hidden the results and pretended I’d never done it – and lied to you about that.  Is that what you’d wanted?  Real lies?  What would you have done when you found that out?”  He takes a quick breath and carries on before she can say anything.  “I’ll tell you what you would have done.  You’d have walked away, with a real reason not to trust me.  And you’d have been absolutely justified.”

He draws another breath.  Beckett’s face is white and drawn.  “Or I could do what I did. Let it play out, leave it if nothing were found, and tell you the truth so you could make your own decisions if something was.  So I did that.  But you wouldn’t listen when I tried to tell you, you just decided straight away without even hearing me out that you couldn’t trust me.”

 “So you didn’t lie.  So what, Castle?  You knew exactly what you were doing and you didn’t tell me about it because I told you I’d kick you to the kerb if you did.”  She hasn’t yet understood what he’s said – that he’d done it before she’d told him not to.  “You just wanted a way out because you’d had what you wanted and got bored, and you thought you’d arrange things so I would ditch you and everyone would feel sorry for you.  I don’t know why you’ve bothered showing up here.”

“We both know that’s not true.  I didn’t do it so we’d break up.  I didn’t want to break up and I wasn’t bored.  I told you I’d done it because you deserved to hear the truth, even though you might be really mad, and if you’d listened to me I’d have told you what I found so you could solve your case.  I came here to make you listen to the truth.”

“You went and interfered in my past.  You had no right to do that.  It wasn’t up to you to decide what to do with my mom’s case.”

“No, it wasn’t.”  Beckett is silenced.  “Which is why I was going to give you what I’d found and then you could decide what to do with it.  But you wouldn’t listen when I wanted to explain that.”

“You just don’t get it, do you?  You had no right to look in the first place.”  Beckett’s angry and upset all over again.

Castle pauses for thought.  He doesn’t like what he’s going to say next, and he’s absolutely certain that Beckett won’t.  But he thinks, for what feels like the thousandth time, at this point it’s all fucked anyway and it can’t get worse.  So he might as well be painfully honest, because there’s no point in being anything else.

“I didn’t think of that, in the beginning.  I wanted to know about you.   You wouldn’t even tell me your name, for God’s sake.”  Beckett’s looking entirely sceptical.

“So it was just another way of getting me into bed.” 

“No!  We’d already fallen into bed by then.”

“So what the hell was it, then?  Curiosity?  Prying?  A game?  Proving you could be better than me?”

“Not better.  Useful.  I wanted – at the beginning I wanted – you to see me: that I wasn’t just a nuisance; that I could be helpful.  All you cared about was solving crime, so I thought if I could help solve that one – the one that was most important to you - you’d see there was more to me and you’d see there could be something between us.”  He takes an uncertain breath.  “I wanted you to stop hurting so much.  I thought if I could make it better you’d be happy.  If you were happy – if I could make you happy – you’d stay.”

“What?  So you could take care of me?” Beckett says with acid bitterness.  “You keep saying you wanted to stop it hurting me but you never stopped to think that maybe I knew how I wouldn’t get hurt better than you did.  Tell me why you thought you knew what would suit me better than I would?”  Her tone of cold, edged enquiry cuts sharply through the air.

“Everyone knew you were burning yourself out.  _Everyone_ , except you.  And no-one knew how to stop you.”

“And you did.”  It falls like a stone.  Castle ignores that.

“Montgomery only let me in to distract you – to annoy you or amuse you or something so you stopped thinking about murder all the time.  He knew you were burning out.  Espo told me he didn’t care how much of a pain I was, if I stopped you burning out.  Ryan told me you were only ever one step away from the edge.  Even Lanie told me you needed someone to take your mind off the job.”

“I don’t have to listen to you.”  Castle stands in the doorway, to stop her leaving.

“No.  You’re going to listen.  The only way you’ll listen is if I make you stay.  Otherwise you’ll just run away and hide and block it all out and you’ll disappear into your murder board till it all comes crashing down.”  He stops.  “But maybe that’s what you want.  No friends, no lovers, no life.  There are faster ways to join your mother, if that’s what you’re looking for.”  He stops again.  She’s hardly breathing.  Every inch of her is tense.  “Is it?”  Suddenly he’s terrified, as she doesn’t answer, that it is.  “Why did you come up here?”

“To get away from the case,” Beckett spits.  “So I didn’t have it clawing at me every minute I was in New York.  So I wasn’t one elevator ride from diving straight back into it and killing myself searching all over again.”  Her face twists bitterly.  “All because you thought you could _help_.”  It twists again, as if she’s trying not to vomit.  “All because you found something.   Do you know what that does to me?  How am I supposed to concentrate on other people’s dead _knowing_ that there’s a lead out there on my own case?  You think I don’t want to spend every last minute chasing it down, running after it instead of dealing with other people’s cases, instead of doing my job?  So I came up here so that I couldn’t.  No cell.  No internet.  No Archives.”  She stops, breathes once, harsh punctuation, starts again. 

“No you.  No temptation to wring out of you what you found and go right back down the rabbit hole after it.”  Her words spill out of her faster than her brain can keep up.  “ If you’d really wanted to _help_ instead of feed your ego and manage my life for me, you’d have waited for me to tell you about it like I was going to” – she stops short.  That was _not_ something she had meant to say.  There’s an absolutely dreadful silence.  Castle looks as if she’s hit him with a two-by-four.

“You were going to talk about it?  _You_?  When?”


	69. Let somebody love you

“When I’d closed the Moran case,” Beckett says miserably.  She didn’t want to get to this position.  She wanted to move on and forget all of this ever happened.  But now she’s painted herself into a corner where she can’t avoid this conversation. 

“You were going to tell me about it.”  Beckett makes a short, sharp, _so-what_ gesture.  “Why were you going to do that?”

“Doesn’t matter.”  She looks him full in the face and deliberately chooses words to hurt, words that will make him let go, words that will make him leave before she has to recognise the truth of his words and that she was wrong.  Because if she does that she’ll forgive him and let herself care about him again and everything she is will all come crashing down again when it all falls apart just like it always has.  “That was when I thought you could be trusted.  Since you can’t be, it doesn’t matter what I thought.  I was wrong.”

“It _does_ matter.  You have no reason not to trust me, except in your screwed-up mind where wanting to help or care or do something for you, even if it was the wrong thing, means to you – not to anyone else – that you’re being controlled.  Let’s just look at what you thought up till a few days ago.  You trusted me to have your back, you trusted me in bed” – she flinches, and he dies a little inside – “and I have _not_ tried to manage your life and you know it.  Sure I made a huge mistake and I shouldn’t have done it, but I didn’t do it to hurt you and I keep trying to say sorry and tell you that it was all done before you told me not to.”  He stops, angry that he can’t get his point across.  “You never answered me.  Since it was done anyway, should I have lied to you for however long I could, kept running with it and never told you about it?  Is that what I should have done?” 

There’s a nasty pause.  Beckett knows perfectly well that she’d have regarded that as far worse.  And this time she’s snagged the discontinuity.  _It was all done before you told me not to_?  It doesn’t matter.  It’s too late.  So thinks her bitter, hurt, angry surface mind.  Underneath, the tectonic plates of her convictions that he can’t be trusted are shifting at strength 9 on the Richter scale.

“See,” says Castle, “you would have hated that more.  And it would have been more wrong to hide it than tell you.  And you’re not answering the question.  You’re just avoiding it.  Me.  Us.  Anything that might mean you have to change your views.”

“There is no _us._ ”

“There is so an us.  Or there could be, if you stopped running from it.  And you’re avoiding the question again.”  His tone turns taunting.  “You’re scared of the truth. Or you’re scared of telling me the truth.”  He’s trying to make her lose her temper enough to tell him the truth.  He’s almost at the stage of not caring where telling the truth will take them – he can try to mend it all later – as long as she actually tells some.  She may be the best interrogator he’s ever seen, but he’s learned a lot in the last three months, and one thing he’s definitely learned is how to focus on one thread of an investigation and follow it right to the end.

Beckett’s been avoiding the question of _why_ since this conversation – or row, or fight, or disaster – began.  Since she’s never previously been shy of sharing her opinions, he can only conclude that either she doesn't have an opinion, which is vanishingly unlikely, or she doesn’t like her own reasoning.  Hmm.  Back to the conflict he thought he’d seen between her thoughts and her feelings.  She doesn’t like her own answers – _ah-ha_ – because she’s trying to run away from a _them_ , because she’s trying to convince herself she can’t trust him even while her feelings are telling her she can.  She’s trying to run, because if she has to admit to the truth she’ll have to admit she’s run out of road.  Though this being Beckett, she might just run right over the edge of the cliff anyway.  Well, he has to take that chance.

“Why were you going to tell me?”  Beckett recognises persistence when she sees it.  This question simply is not going to go away.  Well, if he wants truth he can have truth.  He can have so much truth that he chokes on it.  And then he’ll see that there’s no hope and he’ll finally _go away_ , and she won’t have to risk anything.  Caring only hurts.  Trust is always betrayed.  She’s had that rammed down her throat this last week, again.   She should never have forgotten it.  She can’t afford to trust her feelings, regardless of what he’s just said.

“Why?” Beckett says acidly.  “Because I thought” – her tone would etch marble – “that I could trust you.  I thought that” – she stops, looks away, out of the window and into the distance.  “It doesn’t matter what I thought.  I was wrong.”

“It does matter,” Castle forces out, through gritted teeth.  “Stop avoiding it.  I want to hear your reasons. _What_ did you think?”

“Why do _you_ care?  You don’t need to know this, you only need to leave.”

“I’m not leaving.  I don’t care what you say, you’re not chasing me away without reasons.  Without telling the truth.  I told you before, when you stop fighting I’ll still be here.  I think you’re fighting yourself, so I’m staying here till the fighting’s done.  So answer the damn question, Beckett, _why_ were you going to tell me?”

“Okay then,” she spits venomously, “I thought you wouldn’t interfere in my life.  I thought if I explained you’d leave it alone.  And because I thought that we’d agreed that you wouldn’t interfere and try to _take care_ of me, you wouldn’t ask about my past and you wouldn’t pry, I thought that if I told you, you were different enough from Sorenson that you wouldn’t treat me like a victim.  Except you already were, weren’t you?  Treating me like someone who couldn’t make decisions for themselves.  Thinking that you had the right to manage my life.  Like I said, I was wrong.  About all of it.  Especially, about you.”

“You weren’t wrong then, you’re wrong now.  I’m _not_ Sorenson.  I don’t think you’re a victim or weak or that you shouldn’t be first through the door.  I don’t think you should quit your job and be a housewife – you’d be lousy at it anyway and anyone with half an ounce of sense would know that.  So stop thinking I think like that idiot did.  I don’t.  If I did I’d never have looked into the damn case at all because I’d think you shouldn’t _worry your pretty little head_ ” – his angry sarcasm would carve rock – “about it.  I wanted to help you solve it so you got the same closure you’ve tried to give everyone else.  So you got out the rabbit hole you buried yourself in and got a life, not just an existence.”  He’s getting ever angrier with her evasions.

“And you still haven’t given me a truthful or a complete answer.  Well, I know why you’re lying to me now.  You’re scared.  You’re scared because you know we had something, and I won’t fit into your stupid preconceptions that everyone betrays you; and because I don’t fit your insane worldview you wouldn’t even look at the evidence before you made up your mind that we were done.  All because you were too scared to risk having something.”

“All you ever wanted was the sex and the story.  Stop pretending you wanted more.   You didn’t want to _have something_.  You’re only here because your oversized ego can’t stand losing.  You don’t care and you never did.  You didn’t help and you can’t help because you haven’t the faintest idea what I want.”

“I have plenty idea what you want.  You want to hide from anything that might make you care about something other than murder.  You need to try thinking about what you really want rather than making up excuses why you don’t want it or don’t need it or don’t deserve it.”  Pause, and back to the main point, sure of this ground, at least.  “You’re just too scared to take a risk.  Too scared to admit you might be going about this all wrong.  Too scared to let anybody help you or care about you in case it doesn’t fit your half-assed misconceptions about people trying to control you.  _You_ haven’t the faintest idea what’s help and what’s care and what’s control and you’re so screwed up about it thanks to that bastard Sorenson that you won’t even _try_ to tell the difference.”

Beckett loses her temper in one searing, blinding instant.

“You wanna know the difference?  _Help_ would have been you never getting involved at all.  _Help_ would have been not pushing me back to the edge of the rabbit hole and watching me try not to fall in.  _Help_ would have meant you understanding that I didn’t touch my mother’s case because it would destroy me all over again.  So you tell me how you deciding for me that I should go back down into the pit when I was staying clear was _help_?”

“Because you never got out the pit in the first place.  Because you were – you _are_ \- killing yourself to solve everyone else’s tragedy all by yourself because you couldn’t solve your own.”  He’s starting to lose his own temper, and with it his filters.  “You tell _me_ , Beckett, what’s the difference between your father drowning in alcohol and you drowning in murder?  Seems to me like you’re just taking a more socially useful route to suicide.  At least you can tell yourself you’re doing some good along the way.  I’m sure that’ll comfort all your friends –if you haven’t driven all of them away too - when you flame out.”  Castle’s nearly as angry as Beckett, now.  She won’t listen.  She’ll just carry on killing herself.  And he is _not_ going to let that happen.

 “I am _not_ Sorenson.”  Now he knows what the difference in their expressions was, between how he looked at her and how Sorenson looked at her.  Sorenson hadn’t loved her. “I never thought you were a victim or less or” – he’s cut off mid-flow.

“You’re just as bad.  You only looked into the case because _you_ thought it should be solved.  It had nothing to do with me at all.” 

“You stupid stubborn idiot.  It had everything to do with you.” Castle rasps, completely devoid of control or filters.  “I couldn’t stand to see you hurting and I thought if it were solved you’d stop hurting.  So sue me for caring how you felt.”

“Why should you care anyway?  All you wanted was to get laid.”  She knows perfectly well that’s not true, but she’s desperate not to have to face the truth that’s beating her over the head.  “You got that, so why are you here?  I don’t want you here.  I never wanted a relationship with you anyway.”

“Are you really this dumb or do you just save it up for me?  If I _just wanted to get laid_ why the fuck would I be here?  If that was all I wanted I’d have stopped following you around the first time we went to bed – which would have been the last time we went to bed, because if that were true I’d have left it as a one night stand – just like you wanted.  It’s you who just wanted to get laid, it’s you who never wanted anything more, it’s you who never opened up about anything.”

“Like you opened up?  You never wanted anything more either.  It was all just a game to you: Clue, with added sex.”

“It wasn’t a game.”  He’s shouting now.  “It was never a game.  I came after you because I love you.”

There’s another awful silence.  He had absolutely not meant to say that in that way.  He’d meant to tell her gently and softly and lovingly and preferably with her in his arms; not in the middle of yet another screaming argument.  Well, it’s out there. Beckett’s shroud-white but her eyes are flaming emerald.

“You arrogant fucking asshole.  You think I’m going to believe that?  Get out of here.  You know absolutely nothing about love.  You’re just as bad as Sorenson was” – and that just does it.  Castle reaches over, hauls her into him, and releases all his fury and frustration and desire and love into one incinerating kiss.  And then he stops and pushes her away.  If he doesn’t push her away now he won’t and they’ll end up in bed and he is not actually at all sure that she wants that even if she’s just shoved her hands into his hair and dragged his head down to hers.  So he pushes her away and gets out of the house before he does something else stupid, just like coming here had been stupid and kissing her was stupid and telling her he loved her was incredibly stupid.  Because she only cares about the sex.  _You never wanted anything more either_ , she’s just said.  _Either_.  She didn’t want anything else at all.

Well, he’d wanted truth and he’s got it.  He’s failed.  She doesn’t want a relationship, she’s not interested in love, and he is not going to pursue her when she doesn’t feel the same way as he does.  He’d thought she did.  Seems he’d been wrong.  He slumps his shoulders and leans heavily on his elbows, thinking of nothing and utterly miserable.  He might as well go back inside, pick up his bag and go home.  There’s no point staying.  He’s not interested in a series of booty calls, and he doesn’t see any way that he can mend this.  He can’t make her feel, he can’t make her love him, he can’t stop her burning out.  Because she will, if he’s not there, because in some way over the last three months he’s stood between her and disaster, even when he didn’t know it, even as he grew to realise it. 

He can’t save her.

Time to give up.  His failure bites into him in a way it hasn’t since he was a child, failing to keep up, failing to keep friends, failing to protect his mother or the ingénue or his own heart and soul.  And now he’s failed again.  He won’t have the relationship he wanted, he can’t make her better, he won’t even be able to write.  _Congratulations, Beckett.  I thought I’d broken you.  You’ve certainly broken me._   Time to go home.  He stands slowly and puts his hand to the door to go inside, when he becomes aware of something quite, quite unexpected.

* * *

 

Beckett flares into the explosive kiss.  All that matters is that his mouth is back on hers and his hands are holding her and she’s tucked hard against his body and _oh_ he should have stopped talking and shown her how he felt by kissing her like this twenty minutes ago.  Or last night.  Or preferably Tuesday last.  Because she can’t disbelieve this.  And then he pushes her away and she’s left standing looking at his back as he walks out the door to the porch and pulls it mostly shut behind him.

She sits down hard on the chair and puts her head down on her arms so she doesn’t start to cry all over the table.  There doesn’t seem to be anything else to do.  He yelled in the heat of the moment and another shattering argument that he loves her, looked so shocked at what he’d said that it had to be true, then when she argued he kissed her like he really, really meant it – and then he just dropped it and walked away as if he’s done.  She pushes her head into her arms and lets herself weep.  He’s given up.  He’s done.  She’s driven him away just like she told herself she wanted to and told herself she had to and it’s not what she wants at all. 

Because he really meant it.  He loves her, and he did everything he did to try to make her happy, because everything he saw – the little she let him see – only showed him that all she wanted was to solve cases.  Of course he thought she’d want to know more, of course he thought she’d want to solve her mother’s case.  All she ever let him see was that she solved homicides.  He’d gone out to get her some answers that she’d never have got for herself, wrapped it all up like a present, a gift to make her happy: he’d have handed it to her to let her do with it as she wished, because he’d seen what Sorenson had been like and was determined never to be like that.  And he’d done it all before she’d told him not to.  Even if his motives had been very doubtful at first, he’d tried to give her something he thought she’d want more than anything else, he’d wanted to stop her hurting.  She could, and should, have trusted him.  But her own history came back to bite her and so she wouldn’t see what was right in front of her and now he’s leaving because she’s driven him away.  Caring only hurts, but this time her pain is self-inflicted.

Well, she’s got the rest of her fortnight to get over it.  It’s what she was planning to do anyway.  Somehow that doesn’t help at all.  She could have done it, squashed down all her own emotions and – _face it, Kate_ – love, when she believed she couldn’t trust him and he really didn’t care.  She doesn’t see how she’s going to make that work knowing how he feels.  Felt.  But he’ll go.  He won’t be around the precinct, he won’t be annoying her or amusing her or cheering her up.  She won’t have her partner.  It’ll be right back to how it was four months ago.  Only now she’ll know how it could have been.  She scrubs her eyes into her sleeve and lets misery take over completely, mourning what might have been.

It’s all dead, and she killed it.  She catches killers, but this time she only needs to look in the mirror to solve this case.  She need only arrest herself.  Sentence, life in solitary, without parole.  She stops thinking.  Thinking, like caring, only hurts.

* * *

 

 _She’s crying_.  Why would _she_ be crying?  She doesn’t care.  She said so.  She only wanted sex, not a relationship.  She said that, too.  Castle stands still, hand locked around the door handle, and tries not to react to Beckett’s distress.  She doesn’t want him, she doesn’t want a relationship, she won’t trust him.   She certainly won’t love him.  But he still can’t bear to hear her crying and not comfort her, just like he couldn’t leave her to her nightmare, or couldn’t leave her when he could help her forget. 

He pulls her up and pulls her in and walks her all the way to the couch and tucks her gently into his lap and against his shoulder and in all that distance she doesn’t look at him once.  He thinks she’s still crying, but there’s not a sound from her and he can’t see her face with her head bent.  He lays his cheek against her hair and holds on, waiting for her to be ready to talk again.


	70. Talk to me

Beckett has no idea why she’s suddenly in Castle’s arms and then on his lap.  There is no logical explanation.  Anyway, she’s too tired and too unhappy to care if it’s Castle or Hugh Jackman or Jimmy the Rat Moran.  _Liar_ , says her semi-conscious mind.  She makes a considerable effort and stops crying.  Crying doesn’t ever help anything.  Still, it takes her longer than would be optimal to stop.  Optimal, of course, would have been not crying at all.  _Optimal_  would have been engaging her brain to work out what he’d said before losing her temper.  Well.  Sitting here is not going to help, either.  Two weeks’ solitude will.  She shifts, preparing to stand.  At which point she realises more or less simultaneously that Castle is holding her tucked in sufficiently tightly that moving will take more effort than she is capable of making right now, and that his head is resting on hers.  She is, in fact, wrapped in, and when she does try, very half-heartedly, to move, it achieves precisely nothing.

Castle still doesn’t understand why Beckett’s been crying, given what she said.  So he’s decided that what he wants is truth, and what she needs is comfort, and is therefore rather disinclined to let go of her.  Anyway, if it’s all as dead as he thinks it is, he’ll take this opportunity for one last bittersweet chance to have her firmly in his arms before he has to leave.  So when she seems to be preparing to stand up he doesn’t do anything to ease her path.  Strangely, she doesn’t fight that, simply slumps back down.  Which makes him think that actually there is a better than slim chance that Beckett is regretting the position she’s got herself – well, both of them, actually – into.  Hmm.  They’re both responsible for this disaster, and it looks like both of them have finally realised it.  That’s a little more hopeful than any time this last week.  Still, don’t spoil it by pushing.  Wait her out.  Pushing has proved, from the events of this week, to have been a pretty dreadful strategy, so now might be a good opportunity simply to try to cosset and soothe this unusually passive Beckett.  He strokes gently over her back and settles her more comfortably into his shoulder, not accidentally swinging her legs up on to the couch so that she’s more fully against his chest.  Silence shrouds the room.

Beckett makes another attempt to slide off Castle’s knee, which has almost as much success as the first one – that is, none at all.  In fact, it’s distinctly counterproductive.  All it gets her is held closer, though Castle doesn’t say anything at all.  For a considerable while, neither does Beckett.  When she does say something, it’s not really helpful for getting herself out of this position.

“I thought you had gone,” Beckett whispers into Castle’s shirt front.  “Why aren’t you leaving?”

Which is phrased very unhelpfully, but sounds like a completely emotionally confused question.  It sounds, in fact, as if Beckett thought that he had decided to leave, and that she’s completely failed to understand that he was only leaving because she didn’t want him to stay.  Possibly.  Or alternatively, she’s about to tell him unmistakably to go.  It occurs to Castle that neither of them appear to have the slightest clue what the other wants or is thinking, which in this situation is even more dangerously volatile and liable to lead to the wrong result than their usual system: not talking, and when they do managing only complete miscommunication.  But – Beckett is still tucked in and not fighting to move away at all.   In fact, her hand has crept up (surely without her knowledge or consent) to nestle into his shirt.  And all of that makes him think that it’s more likely the first reason than the second which is informing her bedraggled question.  And so he answers with the truth, and hopes against all reason that he’s guessed correctly.

“I don’t think you want me to, now,” he murmurs, as softly as the snow falls.  There’s a small, hopeless breath somewhere just below his chin.  He holds her just a little closer, and waits through another desolate span of time, until she should speak once more.  Her hand migrates unconsciously upward towards his shoulder, pulling herself inward. 

“Why?  Why does what I want matter to what you do now?  You’ve decided to leave.”

Ah.   _Major_ misunderstanding here.  Hope bubbles nervously in his chest.  He replies with another enticement to conversation, to truth.

“If I thought you wanted me to go...”  And waits some more, through more of the suffocating, smothering silence, until finally, almost inaudible…

“No…” as quiet and unplanned and pleading as when he’d offered atonement and his departure from her life as sacrifice.  She’d denied that he should leave then, too.

“No?”  He’s equally quiet: a question, not a statement.  Hope springs full-flower in his mind.  If this should be _no_ , then other matters might yet be _yes_.  She’s wordless for a long time more, but her traitorous, revealing hand slips further up, around his shoulder, and curls around his neck, feeding his blossoming hopes.

“I thought you wanted to leave.  I thought you _were_ leaving.”  Choked words, harsh breath, redolent of misery.  He simply holds her as close as he can, terrifyingly gently, not wanting to disturb this fragile chance of confidences.

“No.”  He says nothing more, still waiting for her to speak, to explain, to confirm.

“No…?” The implied question trails off into nothingness.

“No.”  And give a little, because neither of them can cope with more than a little at once, and hope that he gets a little in return.  “I thought that _you_ wanted me to leave.”  There’s a shudder against him, swift, instinctive negation of that thought.  “It’s okay,” he soothes.  “I won’t go if you don’t want me to.”  He’s wholly protective, cradling this flickering, fragile flame between them till it can strengthen and burn on its own.  No need to force a flashpoint now, and every reason not to.

“Don’t go.   Please don’t go.”  The desperation in that plea is all he needed to hear, and tells him all he needs to know, for now.  They have a chance to make this all right again. 

“I won’t.”  Not now, and if he has his way, not ever.  He kisses the crown of her head, pressing the kiss like a promise into her hair, and then, for the first time, she looks up and meets his eyes.  He kisses her again, soft on her lips: not scorching passion but gentle, brief, affection, and they relax against and into each other, still no word spoken to break the spell.  Eventually, they will have to move, or speak, but that time is not now.  Here, out of the maelstrom, they’ve found a still centre to stand within, together; for this time free of the turmoil and torment they’ve inflicted on themselves.  But for now, there is peace, and calm, and each other.

* * *

 

At last, though, someone has to speak.  Comfortable and comforting as this may be, it’s only a stopgap, not a cure.

Beckett recognises, with extreme reluctance, that it’s up to her to give the first explanations.  After all, Castle has followed her here – she suddenly wonders _how_ he found her; _why_ has become obvious – and he’s explained his position, albeit by way of a shattering fight and still not entirely completely.  So it’s for her to begin.  She owes him that, and more than that.

“I thought you’d heard me say not to look into it” – no need to specify _it_ – “and gone straight ahead and done it anyway.  I thought if you’d done that, that you were just managing my life regardless of what I wanted or decided: just doing what you thought was right for me without paying any attention to my opinions or my right to make my own decisions.  Overriding me.”  She pauses.  The next part of this is something she’s never discussed with anyone, not even Lanie.  “That’s what… other people” – she doesn’t say Sorenson, interestingly, though that’s what Castle had expected, and he doesn’t want to break the mood by trying to clarify right now – “tried to do.”  She stops, clearly gathering herself.  “Sorenson did it.  He thought I was nothing but a victim and couldn’t see that being a cop was – is – what I am.  He thought I was only doing it as a stopgap.” 

Castle wonders, very privately, if Sorenson hadn’t got hold of more than he knew.   It certainly is not a stopgap, and Beckett is equally certainly a cop first, last and foremost, but she’s also been hiding in being a cop for ten years.  Saying that will not help anyone. 

“He wanted the whole nine yards: two-point-two kids and a white picket fence, in Boston.  Except I didn’t.  We were still discussing that when he started getting jealous of everyone - every man – I worked with, and then he couldn’t do what was right for the case and couldn’t see that he was the problem.  You know how that went down.”  There’s a very long pause.  Castle waits.  There’s more to this: he can sense it.

“He wasn’t the first.”  Castle inadvertently tightens his arms round her, in response to that unbelievable statement.  Beckett – confident, alpha, take-no-prisoners and brook no hindrance Beckett – got into not one but more than one would-be controlling relationship?  He consciously relaxes his grip.  She’s not looking at him again, but down into her knees.  Somehow, she’s drawn into herself and shrunk.  “It was fine until I got involved with a guy in senior year at college.  We were getting pretty serious.  But then… he thought that if I liked it in bed” – Castle’s left to infer that _it_ refers to Beckett’s preference for someone else taking control – “I’d like it all the rest of the time.  I kicked him out as soon as I realised he was trying that” – that’s not a surprise.  He’d have been astonished if she’d put up with it – “and he didn’t take it well.  So I didn’t get involved with anyone much, after that.” 

She shrugs, as if that’s it.  He doesn’t think it is.  There’s an interesting element of timing there.  _After_ she’d transferred to NYU, and therefore after her mother’s murder.  He wonders what, if anything, Beckett had had by way of a life between transferring and this.  And she’s skipped a big chunk of that, too, though he doesn’t think she’s realised it.  _He didn’t take it well_ could cover an awful lot of matters that someone might want to forget.

“Will wasn’t like that.  He wasn’t interested in much beyond plain vanilla.  So I thought it would be okay.  And I thought he’d understand about my mother.  But all he saw was that I was a victim to be protected and stifled, and that he could make all the decisions for us.  So I didn’t bother, any more.”  Castle still thinks there’s a whole lot missing from both those explanations.  But it’s enough, for now.  Two serious relationships, two serious disasters, both down to misplaced trust.  No wonder she’d reacted so instantly, and so badly.  He hugs her gently.  She’s still talking, quietly, intent on her knees.

“And then you appeared.  It seemed – after a while” – there’s a fragment of normal, biting, Beckett behind those last words, and Castle thinks about the times he’d  _told_ her they’d do something: escort her home, or dine at Po; or any of the times he’d tried to take care of her; and he sees why those were so badly received – “that you could actually manage to separate bed and life.  Then you started asking about my mom’s case” – she draws a stabilising breath, but he’s already noted the wince and the shudder – “and I had to shut that down.  When you didn’t make a fuss about me calling in my favour from Sorenson – even though you clearly hated it – it seemed like you wouldn’t interfere.  So then I thought I’d got it right, I was going to explain.  But…” she stops, fighting for control of her So.voice.

“But then I trampled right into the middle of it and it looked _exactly_ like I was doing what those others had done.”  Beckett nods, not looking at him.  “So you did what you’ve always done.  Kicked it to the kerb and took off to recover by yourself.  Which was fine for those others because they deserved it – did they try to explain?”  He suddenly wants to know why she wouldn’t even let him explain.  Another wordless assent, and more becomes clear.

“They _tried_ ,” Beckett says harshly.  “I even listened.  They had no good reasons.  There _were_ no good reasons.”  Castle can understand that.  He hopes Alexis would do the same as Beckett: kick any such man right out of her life.  He hopes harder that it will never be necessary, and further that he wouldn’t be as incapable of support as Beckett’s father had been, who, on his rough calculation of timing, would for both catastrophes have been drowning in whiskey.

“I see,” says Castle, slowly.  Oh, he sees all right.  He sees the whole of this story, as clearly as he sees Nikki.  Every last word of it.  Two previous serious relationships with two men who couldn’t keep their controlling streak confined to games in the bedroom.  Two men who’d wanted a toy doll, not a real woman.  Two men who couldn’t give an explanation because there could never _be_ a good explanation.  _Do as I say because I’m male_ went out with the Ark, in Castle’s opinion.  Except where – and only where – mutually agreed, behind one’s own front door, and revocable at any time.

So.  Two massive betrayals, another by her father, ongoing till he finally sobered up, and a fourth because her mother’s case was never solved.  From then, ten years ago, till now, a litany of trust broken.  No surprise she has issues with trusting anyone.  And just when she thought she might – just when she was starting to trust him in everything, not only in bed – he’d blundered right into it and screwed up spectacularly.  Oh yes, he sees it all.  He wants, very strongly, to deal with two of those four betrayals.  But Beckett is not his mother, and he shouldn’t even think about fixing this for her.  She doesn’t need him to, and it would prove that he’s just as bad as they were.  If she wanted to deal with them she would, and could – and in Sorenson’s case, did.

She wouldn’t let him explain, because there were no good explanations any other time.  For any of it.  How could her father explain that he loved alcohol more than his equally bereaved daughter; how could anyone explain that some cases never get solved; (she’d talked about lazy cops.  Maybe that was more than professional experience?) how could she explain to herself that she couldn’t solve it?  So why wait for another implausible explanation?  Why waste her time?  Simply cut your losses, and walk away.  Block it out, and drown yourself in work to ensure it stays blocked.  Don’t try again.  She’d not had a relationship – of any sort, and he thinks that means not even a fling – since Sorenson.  Better to be alone than to be betrayed again.

“You were right there in the middle of exactly what I’d told you not to do and it looked like you were just as bad as they were.  Except it was so much worse, because I had thought I could trust you to keep it to the bedroom” – that same _it_ again – “and not try to run my life for me or try to control me; and here it was again.  Another complete disaster.”

Does she know what she’s just admitted?  If nothing else, she’s just said that she was, at least by the end, regarding their relationship as serious.  Hope puts out another flush of blooms.

“So that was that.  Except you wouldn’t quit the precinct.”  Another uncomfortable, lengthy pause.  “Like the guy in college.”  Castle suddenly sees the next piece of this problem looming up before him.  “He kept trying to start things up again.  He wouldn’t listen when I said I didn’t want to.”  And another silence.  There are a lot of unspoken words crammed into that space of silence.  “Eventually I got rid of him for good.”  And even more words missing from that last sentence.  A whole novel, in fact.  How Beckett got rid of that man might be an extremely interesting story, at another time, quite soon.  It doesn’t matter right now.  “You just kept coming back.  And I couldn’t see why, because it looked like you’d deliberately broken everything.”  Another pause.

“I need some coffee,” Beckett says abruptly.  Truthfully, she needs a break from all this lacerating honesty.

“May I have some too, please?” Castle asks, with strict attention to correct grammar: his own small way to maintain control of himself.

“Yeah.  I’m sorry, Castle.”  And she is not, he hears in her voice, apologising about the coffee.  “You deserved better.”

Castle releases her and follows to see whether he can help, and if help is not required at least acquire another cup of coffee of his own.  It rapidly becomes clear from the set of Beckett’s spine that help is not welcome.  It seems almost as if she’s using the small discipline of coffee-making to calm herself.

Beckett puts some more coffee grounds in the pot, and more water in the kettle, and locates a mug for herself.  Castle slides his on to the counter and very carefully ensures that he isn’t in the way.  Beckett looks somewhat strained, which is hardly a surprise.  He flicks a glance at his watch and notices that it’s after eleven.  He also notices that outside is bright and sunny.

“Shall we take the coffee outside, Beckett?  I haven’t had fresh air in months.  Manhattan’s hardly salubrious.”  And it’s a distraction, and a break.  He’s tense simply listening to Beckett’s tale.  She nods, focused on brewing the coffee.  They settle themselves on the porch, and to Castle’s considerable (and concealed) amazement Beckett sits down next to him and tucks herself in.  He slings an arm round her, and for a while they only sit, looking into the woods, while the tension lessens and finally starts to drain away.

“Can I explain now?”  There’s an assenting hum.  Castle gathers his own thoughts, and his history.  “I ought… need to… start with Mother.  Otherwise this won’t make any sense.  She… I… don’t know who my father is.  Was.  Is.  It was a one-night stand that left her with me.”  Breathe.  “It’s not great for a struggling actress to be a single mom.” 

Beckett, listening in cop mode, as if Castle were a vital, and co-operative, witness, would bet several months’ salary that _not great_ in this context translates to not far short of utter disaster.  “Anyway.  We moved around a lot.  Most of the time, there wasn’t much money” – that’s covering a lot of old pain – “but Mother always made sure I had enough food, clothes, somewhere proper to sleep.”  There’s a big chunk of evidence missing there, too.  Like what his _mother_ had had.  Or, more likely, hadn’t had.  “Likely she didn’t, sometimes.”  Riiight.  She slips her hand on to Castle’s knee, reassurance.  “I spent a lot of time backstage, reading.  Once I learned to read, that is.  I learned pretty early.”  There’s more than a hint of cocky, normal Castle in his proud voice.  “I couldn’t stand to hear all the stories in bits from the stage, not even in the narrative order half the time.”  He shakes his head, as if clearing it of memory.

“Just as well I read so much.  There were a lot of new schools.  I was always running to catch up with the new variant on the curriculum.  Always having to make new friends.  I got really good at making friends.”  It’s more bitter than a statement like that should be.  “Being whoever I needed to be to be liked, all the time.”  His breath rasps through the hot summer air.  “It worked really well, right through school.”  But there’s an odd hitch in his voice, there.   If she were interrogating, she’d pull the witness up on that.  “Everyone liked me.  Except the staff.”  He suddenly grins mischievously, and looks far younger.   “I had a lot of good ideas for livening up class.  It wasn’t as if I’d be there for long.  We’d move on again.”  The grin has disappeared during those sentences.

“Everybody likes me.  Until you.  You were the first person who hadn’t liked me since grade school.”   He stops.  “That doesn’t matter.”  It does, Beckett thinks.  But it can matter later, if he doesn’t explain now.  Beckett makes an encouraging, _go-on_ noise.

“Theatre’s” – he’s clearly searching for the right words, unusual in a man who spills out words as fast as a river in spate – “different.  A lot of what goes on isn’t exactly decent.  Men who abuse power.”  His voice has dropped, and he’s looking out into the distance, eyes unfocused as the memories envelop him.  “Men and women who’re abused.  I couldn’t help them.”  He shakes his head again, comes back to the present.  That’s another story that Beckett thinks could usefully be dragged into disinfecting sunlight.  Later, if he doesn’t do it now.  But told it will have to be.

“So anyway.  You didn’t even like me.  And I just couldn’t understand that.  So I set out to make you like me.  But then I saw you weren’t taking care of yourself – you don’t eat regularly, you don’t sleep, and you’re addicted to work.  To murder.  You were burning out and everyone but you knew it.  That was like when my mother couldn’t take care of both of us.  I couldn’t fix her problems then, but I thought I could at least make it better for you: encourage you to eat or sleep or just take care of yourself.  And though I thought – at first – solving your case would make you _like_ like me” – that’s covering a lot of ground in seven-league boots – “then it became about taking the pain away, and then I realised that - because I’d started and I couldn’t just stop – I should give you the results and it was up to you to decide what to do.  And somewhere along the way it changed from being about getting you into bed to being a relationship to” – he pauses, but he can’t say it again.  He turns away from her before he can see her face.  “Except I didn’t realise that till you walked away from me.”  He turns part way back, pain scratched and bleeding everywhere on his face and posture.  “How could you know what I felt when I didn’t?”  Beckett’s hand tightens on his knee, and she sets her coffee cup out the way, takes Castle’s and sets it away from them too.  “It was all about making it better for you, because that’s what I did once I could.  Once I could fix things, take care of people” – Beckett hears _mother_ , at the top of that list – “because for so long I couldn’t.” 

Beckett pulls Castle round and kisses him to stop him talking any more; to answer everything he’s not asking; to take away his fears; to show him that she’s in this too.  Everything she feels is in that kiss, everything she doesn’t know how to say.  There’s much more to be explained, by him.  And she has something she needs to say, too.  But right now, there’s been enough talking.


	71. Bringing me out the dark

He kisses her in return like she’s salvation – and maybe she is – desperate and passionate and with everything he has, still so appallingly unsure that she’s listening or understanding or that he’s made it better.  But she’s in his arms, and she kissed him, and maybe now they can get this back on the right path.  He pulls her as close as he can manage, around and up on to his lap and into him and _that_ is where she should be, should have been this last week, should always be.  He stops kissing her, and simply holds her to him.

Beckett curls her arms round Castle’s waist and neck and does no more than let him know she’s there, and not going any place.  It seems he needs to reassure himself that she isn’t leaving.  Well, she isn’t.  He’s said more than plenty to correct her misapprehensions, and far beyond enough for her to want him to stay, and more than that again.  She wants to tell him… everything.  Somehow it doesn’t seem to be the right time, when he’s so wrung out by his own revelations.  A little voice tells her that perhaps all this last week of trouble could have been avoided if only she’d spoken when she first thought of doing so, rather than delaying it till a better time.  But Castle won’t be going anywhere, and nor will she, and there are no murders or cold cases to get in the way here at the cabin.  She snuggles in, and simply enjoys being back close to him.  If it’s what he needs, well, she can certainly provide that.

“You okay, Castle?”  she says eventually. 

“Yes…” but it sounds very uncertain, compared to Castle’s normal confidence.  She feels a sharp stab of guilt.  She’s reduced him to this injured, insecure man.  She hugs him harder, closer, trying to mend through her actions the damage she’s caused with her words, and relapses into her own thoughts.  She sees, very clearly, why he’d been so careful to obtain consent, why he’d been so horrified by his actions that first time in his loft.  He may not have told her the story (and she wonders if it were his mother or someone else: it wasn’t, as it could have been, him) but she’s still the top detective in the bullpen and it’s as clear and bright and obvious as the dawn that he’d been exposed to someone being abused.  It’s also very obvious that all his brash over-confidence was a learned reaction, covering more insecurity than she’d thought could be possible.  No wonder, too, that she’d been unsure whether the sexually suggestive, dominant man who’d set out to get her into bed; or the zanily theorising, happy-go-lucky man of the daytime precinct; or the interesting companion of dinner, was the real Castle.  Because none of them are.  _Being whoever I needed to be to be liked_. 

All of them, but especially the man she’d taken into the precinct from his own party, are just a shell.  The first – well, that had clearly worked on women for years, and it suited his PR.  The second – well, that’s to suit Esposito and Ryan.  Though it does occur to her that either, or indeed both, have probably seen more of the reality than Castle might have realised.  The boys’ hangovers flit through her mind, and suddenly she strongly suspects that all three of them had spent the evening together.  That’s something to be explored another time, too.  There’s a lot to be explored, later.  And there will be a lot of time in which to do it.  That’s something that should be arranged, right now.

“I’m staying up here till my vacation’s over, Castle.” 

He hears that with a kind of sick feeling.  It doesn’t necessarily sound hopeful.  It sounds like _I want to be alone_ : Beckett as Greta Garbo, not that this is an unusual comparison.  He’d wanted to take her home, and just be them, together: find out who they might be without the precinct binding them.  “Would you…” she stutters, slightly, not sure how this will be received, “would you like to stay?”

“Here?”  There’s complete amazement in that question.  Beckett’s heart sinks.  Of course the metropolitan, metrosexual Castle won’t want to stay in a cabin in the woods miles from anywhere, with no cable – no TV – and only solitude around them.  It had been a silly thing to say.

“I’m sorry.  That was stupid.  It’s okay if you don’t” –

“Yes.”

“Huh?”

“Yes.  I want to stay.”  Oh yes, he definitely wants to stay.  There’s a very soft sigh – of relief? – against his shoulder.  He becomes more particularly aware that while he may be clinging to Beckett, she is also quite noticeably clinging to him.  She hadn’t been sure of that answer, had she?  So much uncertainty, still, for both of them, about each of them.  “I want to stay here, with you.”  And that statement is thoroughly definite, as is the arm that he tightens round her.  And having got her tightly wrapped in, Castle uses his free hand to tip up Beckett’s face and lean in to kiss her again: take her mouth and show her that _staying_ is only the beginning of what he wants.  Now, _now_ that he’s finally sure that she wants him, that she cares; (and he thinks there’s far more than caring) he can invade and possess and conquer: claim her once more as his.

He runs his hand round behind her neck and into her hair, angles her head to give him complete access to Beckett’s full mouth, and takes possession of her as if there could never be any doubt that he has the right to do so.  And just like always, under the pressure of his lips and being held tightly, she opens for him and he’s devouring her because he’s starving for her and then suddenly it flares up and explodes: forest fire after drought.

They only break apart when breathing becomes imperative, and even then they’re still wrapped in each other’s arms.  _Not_ touching seems as impossible as not breathing.  But the desperation and desire of the last few moments has drained away, and both of them are conscious that not everything is fixed yet.  Neither of them, however, know where to start again.

“Is there any food, Beckett? Castle says, plaintively, at last.  “It’s past lunchtime, and there was no breakfast, and no dinner.  I know you don’t need to eat –you must live off sunlight because you eat about a tenth of what you should – but I do.”

Beckett seizes on the opportunity to leave some of the soul-searing honesty and realisations for a while.  She needs some time to process.  So, she expects, does Castle.  Of course, that doesn’t mean that there won’t be a certain amount of interaction, so to speak.  But there has been quite enough to deal with over the morning without adding more.  She’s drowning in knowledge, and it’s time to start to swim.

To Castle’s amazement, there is actually real food in the kitchen, which swiftly becomes lunch, picnic style, outside on the porch.  What there isn’t, is any talking.  Beckett’s lost in thought, her face closed off and nothing registering at all.  Not that he’s any better.  He has a lot to think over, himself.  Starting with Beckett’s story.  Summarised, she expects betrayal, and so prepares for it.  She doesn’t share, because sharing’s never been helpful, and sometimes (he thinks about her father) not possible.  So every way she behaved is perfectly sensible – at least it might have been in moderation, but she’s taken it to extremes, just like everything else in her life - if you look at her history.  Doesn’t want stifled, doesn’t want to talk about her past, creates and maintains an infinite reserve, buries herself in work and has to be the best at it.  Oh, he sees her: reads her story, and weeps.  The dead would be her perfect companion: no demands other than that she solve their case.  No need to take chances or risk betrayal.  A corpse, after all, can do no more damage.  Death, the ultimate betrayal, can’t then betray her further.

Beckett is considering Castle, and wondering which Castle the real one might be, under all those masks.  She thinks it might include the one who takes such care to seek consent, then dominates in just the way they both like in bed; the one who’d apologised with utter sincerity; the one she’s seen with his daughter.  Maybe – likely - the one who throws himself into solving cases as her partner.  Everything else that the world sees, she suspects, is just a covering.  Camouflage.  If she wants to know why – and she needs to know why, or there will never be a real chance for either of them to understand the other, which will mean that there will never be a chance for _them_ – she’s going to have to ask.  And lunch is done.

She clears up, not without offers of assistance from Castle, but she shoos him away.  His large presence is not conducive to rational thought.  Irrational thoughts, now, such as pulling him up the stairs to her bedroom, are arriving with rapidity.  She has, she realises, missed him.  She’d just buried it under her hurt and misery.  Now he’s here, and they’ve both started to explain where they were at, all she really wants to do is curl in and be close.

When she’s finished she pours a jug of water; takes it and two glasses outside to where Castle’s sitting on the porch, staring unfocused into the endless cool, dark, green of the woods, and deep in thought.  Beckett sits down beside him, not close in but preserving a small separation: respecting his – and indeed her – need for a measure of reserve and privacy while they each try to collect their thoughts.

Castle is not so lost in thought that he doesn’t notice both Beckett arriving and the space between them.  He doesn’t want to push the limits of, or break, this fragile connection: but he steals his hand from his lap and very tentatively lays it over Beckett’s hand on her own lap.  She turns her palm upward, interlocks their fingers and moves so that their joined hands lie on the space of the bench seat between them: connection, but not claustrophobia. 

Neither of them look at each other, still less speak.  It’s the same tentative, uncertain, almost-furtive hand-holding of the first approaches of first love.  They remain, simply holding hands, occasionally stroking a thumb absently over the other’s skin, without demands; for some time.

Beckett returns her mind to the question of who the real Castle might be.  She’s decided that before she charges into further interrogation, some reasoning and deduction might be helpful.  Or at least less likely to provoke further disaster.  What had he said?  _Being whoever I needed to be to be liked._ She supposes, thinking about that, that joining a new school, a new community, regularly; leaves you with no real friends.  If you then add to the mix a roaring first-novel best-selling success, people will flock to you.  Most of their motives won’t be good.  Some will be downright malevolent.  Beckett has no high opinion of those who cluster round young stars.  So Castle, being intelligent, likely got burnt once – just once, that’s enough to make a point – and then confined himself to a smooth, PR-friendly, shell. 

Beckett supposes further that since, after that, Castle was hot, rich and a celebrity, everyone fell over themselves to give him everything he wanted in the hope that he’d be friends with them, and unsurprisingly he rapidly became a charming, but spoilt and arrogant, playboy.  But everyone still liked him, because he acted the part well enough that nobody paid any attention to his less admirable qualities.  Or, more likely, didn’t notice them, or didn’t think they were less admirable.  He’d done what he needed to do to be liked – been a stunning success.  That’s enough, for most people. Then she’d walked in and arrested him.  _You were the first person who hadn’t liked me since high school._    She hadn’t.  There’s a huge difference between instant, blazing _want_ and actually liking someone.

Okay.  She gets it, partway.  At first he was protecting himself from being used by hangers-on and other parasitical types, (she thinks of his bimbette ex, for a moment, and wonders briefly if that hadn’t been the time when he was burnt) and then the shell became the public reality and he stopped caring about being anything else.  Except, she thinks, at home.  It’s perfectly clear that his daughter adores him (and vice versa) and that she’s reasonably normal, which argues for a well-adjusted home life.  It’s also clear that his mother is likely as protective of Castle as he is of her.  He hasn’t said that.  Beckett is drawing a reasoned conclusion from his earlier comments around taking care of people.

She sees him now.  Desperate to take care of the people he cares for; (she doesn’t use that other word: it still frightens her) desperate not to be used; desperate to be liked and acting the playboy, don’t-care-Rick-Castle because he can’t trust anyone to like whoever he is under the shell, but everybody loves the playboy.  _Oh, I see you, Castle.  Bright and clear. Except – I don’t.  There’s a lot you haven’t told me, yet. We can start with why._

Unnoticed, the afternoon has passed away and the light is dying into twilight.  Their hands are still joined, brief, necessary, separation only resulting in a renewed flurry of contact.  Beckett has a sudden flash of uncertainty: she’s asked him to stay; she wants him to stay; but she’s not at all convinced that undoubtedly-spectacular make-up sex is what is required.  But she wants, very much, to sleep – no euphemism this – curled against him, safe in his arms, haven from the gathering storm of nightmares.  She doesn’t know how to ask for that.  It seems a very large assumption here and now – a week ago it wouldn’t have been – that, after their devastating fights, he’ll either want to share a bed or, conversely, if he does, be content with such a platonic position.  Or that she will.  But she still feels as if it would be another massive mistake to have sex now.  

She unpicks that thought, and comes to the conclusion that it would be simply another way for both of them to hide: pretend it’s all wholly fixed and not discuss the remaining issues any more.  So.  No sharing beds, tonight.  She’s still pondering that, and how to extract those remaining issues, when she realises that unless she wants to be dinner for a whole air force of small biting insects she needs to go in or get the repellent.

“I’m going inside, Castle.  Too many mosquitoes.  You coming?”

Castle shakes himself out of his reverie and realises that Beckett’s standing up and letting go of his hand.  He doesn’t like that.  He makes a stretch and repossesses it, tugging gently so that she’s standing in closer to him.

“I’m going in, Castle.  I don’t like mosquitoes – but they like me.  I don’t want to look like Dracula’s food bank in an hour.”  She tugs back, and Castle stands up, consenting to be pulled inside.

Nothing more has been said, and consequently nothing resolved, when dinner, a simple pasta and tomato dish, is on the table.  If anything, the silence between them has become heavier, more intense.  Dinner is remarkably quiet.  Castle hasn’t said anything of any length or note in hours (which must certainly be a record, Beckett thinks) and nor has she.  Someone has to start again somehow, somewhere.  She draws nervous little patterns in the pasta shells, only occasionally eating one. Trepidation is clawing at her chest, filling her stomach and destroying her appetite. 

“Coffee, Castle?”  It’s not what she’d like to say.  But she’s scared to say more.  She knows what he said: it’s burnt into her brain as if branded.  But then, those others had said the same, and it had splintered when the crisis came; it hadn’t meant what she understood it to mean, or what it should have meant: void between her and her then-partner.  She busies herself with the kettle and tries to work out what, if anything, she should or could or might say, when an arm arrives around her waist.

“What’s up, Beckett?”  Castle recognises the signs of Beckett thinking, which frightens him more than almost anything else she might do (possibly short of putting a gun to his head: but after all, she’s already pretty much done that, yesterday) since whenever she’s _thought_ about anything to do with them it’s been an utter disaster.  Not that his thinking has generally resulted in any better outcome.  In fact, thinking seems to be downright detrimental to their chances.  He’s thought a lot this afternoon, but it doesn’t appear to have got him any further, and while holding Beckett’s hand is a distinct improvement on not touching her at all, he’d have preferred her to be within the curve of his arm, and preferred it more if she were on his lap.  He doesn’t understand why – it seems – she’s not tucking in close. 

And now she’s messing around with kettles and coffee mugs and not looking at him again, or still, and she spent most of the meal not eating and playing with her food.  He doesn’t understand that either.  Surely she must know how he feels?  He said it, openly, yesterday.  Well.  Yelled it, actually.  But ever since lunch they’ve been almost backing away from everything.  So he curls an arm around her in the hope that a little more contact will help to ease the tension he can feel building.

She hasn’t answered the question, and she’s still got her back to him, and he’s sure she’s chewing on her much-abused lip.  But – she isn’t pulling away.  Such a small thing, to pin such hopes upon.  Then, at this point, even small things are significant.  When her hands are safely away from the boiling water he moves in closer, trying to convey succour, not sex.

“What’s up?” he asks again.  Beckett shrugs, which isn’t an answer at all; but then leans back against his bulk, which is at least not a rejection.  There’s a tightness in her shoulders, which isn’t noticeably improving with contact.  She goes back to fussing with the coffee, and then to sit on the couch.  Perforce, Castle follows, and arranges himself so that one arm is back around her shoulders.  Just as he’s beginning to contemplate direct interrogation, she blurts out some words.

“I-don’t-think-it’s-a-good-idea-to-have-sex-right-now.”  Castle wasn’t aware that he had been suggesting that.  He waits to see if there’s a follow-up that might make matters a little more understandable.  Currently swamp mud would be clearer.  He emits an agreeable noise and feels her relax into his arm.

“I wasn’t suggesting it,” he says equably, and resists the temptation to follow up with a _but I’ll be co-operative if you want to_ variety of statement.  “What’s the problem?”

“It’s not fixed.  I thought if I explained then we would be okay, but nothing’s fixed,” Beckett says, unhappily.  That’s a nasty shock.  Castle had thought that – if not fixed – matters were certainly much improved. 

“Some things – a lot of things – are fixed.  You told me, and I understand, where you were coming from” – well, there are still a few gaps, but they can wait – “and why you acted and reacted as you did.  So that’s fixed.  I’ve told you why I acted like I did, so that’s fixed too.  So what else is there?”

He sounds as if there’s nothing else.  But he’s wrong.  He’s wrong, but he’s brushing it off as if there’s no more to say.  He’s not hearing her concern.  In fact, it sounds very much as if he doesn’t want to discuss this.

Beckett gathers her thoughts, questions and nerve.  “You haven’t, though.  You’ve only told me part of it, but I’ve told you everything.”  She doesn’t realise that actually she hasn’t, she’s buried it so deep.  He’s very still.  She takes a very deep breath.  This is going to ruin any chance of spending the night together, in any fashion, even if she hadn’t already suggested that that wasn’t a good idea, but it has to be said or it will fester and poison any hopes they may have.  It’s become clear to her that there is still a substantial disparity in knowledge: a gap for her to fall into and destroy everything again. 

“You haven’t told me who you saw being abused, though it’s clear it’s a major event.  You haven’t told me why it matters so much that everyone likes you, and that’s an elephant in the room too.  You haven’t told me why you turned yourself into a spoilt playboy when at some point, and at home, and lately, you were a decent man.  You haven’t told me why about _any_ of the key things, and yet you know everything about me.  I know you’ve read my mother’s case file, and that’s why you’re not asking me to explain more, because you already know all of that.  So it’s not fixed, Castle.  Because you aren’t talking and I don’t understand where you’re coming from.  This all went wrong because you didn’t know my story and I didn’t tell you.  If we don’t talk about it” – she laughs once, bitterly –“I know how that sounds, coming from me – we’ll never be right.  I want us to be right, Castle.  What do you want?  Because I think you want us to be right too.” 

She stands up, takes her coffee cup to the sink.  He hasn’t moved, stone still, frozen faced.

“As soon as you’re ready to tell me the rest, I’ll listen.  But now, you look like you need space to think, and I don’t want to be in the way.  I’ll be here if you call me, or in the morning, or whenever you want or you’re ready.  Right now, I’m going upstairs.  I can’t stay down here: it’s not giving you the room you need.  If I don’t understand, all that’ll happen is I’ll hurt you.  I’ll get something wrong again and I’ll hurt you and I don’t want to do that any more.”

She’s halfway up the stairs when he reacts.  “You _haven’t_ told me everything.  You’ve still never told me your name.”

“It’s Kate.”  She pauses, knowing that this will bite, saying it anyway.  “But, Castle, you knew that.  You’ve used it.  You read my file.  So you knew that, too.  You didn’t need me to tell you my name.  You knew a lot, and now you know everything.  I’m here when you’re ready.”

He knows she’s right.  But he’s still staring at the space where she was a moment ago when he hears her door close softly.


	72. An island never cries

Beckett shuts her bedroom door behind her and collapses on to the bed.  That had not gone well.  She stares into the ceiling and wonders when she started treating Castle’s history like a case and him as if he were a witness.  Less than twelve hours ago, she thinks.  About the point she’d realised that he knew everything important about her.  And the point she’d realised that, deliberately or – much more probably - not, he wasn’t telling her the most important matters.  It’s bitterly ironic, she thinks, that she’s criticising someone else for not talking about the pieces of information that are vital to make sense of their life.  But she’s said everything.  Except the most important thing.  Because she won’t, can’t, must not say that until she’s sure he’s prepared to talk too.

She washes, changes into sleepwear and curls down into her bed, seeking comfort in the cool sheets and soft pillows.  Emotionally exhausted sleep overtakes her in short order, but it’s anything but restful.

* * *

 

Castle is still sitting on the couch, incapable of movement.  Beckett’s just ripped all his wounds wide open to expose the gangrenous sores underneath.  He doesn’t want to go there.  He really, really does not want to go back to the time in his life when he wasn’t a success.  He could, if necessary, tell her about the ingénues, and so forth.  That’s not really personal.  Or at least…less personal.   The rest... well.  He’s spent a great deal of time forgetting the rest, and he does not at all want to have to drag it up.  Once, while he thought he’d lost her, had been quite enough.

But the memories come unbidden.  Another schoolyard, in another town.  Another set of established friendship groups: another set of people who didn’t want to know him.  New boy, wrong face, wrong voice, wrong accent.  When he was five, it didn’t matter so much: five year olds make friends quite quickly.  By the time he was nine, it did.  Theatre doesn’t teach you about baseball, or football, or basketball – all the things that all the other boys wanted to talk about and play.  He’d tried.  But he’d been quite a small, skinny child – ironic, that, now: the height and general build may be the luck of the genetic draw but the physique took effort – not talented, or even competent, at sport.  Maybe he could have been, if he’d ever been anywhere long enough to join a team, or be taught.  They had to go where the work was, though.  _(Just another town, another train.)_ Reading, and a wide knowledge of theatre craft, or card sharking, didn’t cut it.  And fairly shortly, the girls wouldn’t play with a boy either. 

Loneliness became a companion, but reading took that away, made him forget the lack of long-term friends, kept him out the way of busy people doing important things.  When a show was a success, and they’d had a little more money, there’d been a small allowance, and he’d bribed his way into friendships with candy, and later booze.  Until he learned that if people laughed with you – after a considerable time of them laughing _at_ him – they tended to like you.  The easiest way to do that was to act confident, make smart, flippant comments, act the class clown.  The teachers hated it, but that didn’t matter, when no-one was looking he worked his ass off and anyway they’d be gone from that town and that school soon enough. 

Before he learned that, though… ah, a different story that had been.  Nose in the schoolyard grass, a knee in his back, a number of interesting bruises that he passed off as accidents.  His mother had worried about how clumsy he seemed to be.  He never told her why, and never complained when they moved on again.  He’d seen how upset she had been when he’d cried, aged five or so, about leaving his friends.  He didn’t like it when she was upset, so he hid it from her, and anyway, as he’s just thought, after a little time it really didn’t matter: they’d be leaving another desperate situation behind.  Crying didn’t help, anyway.  Boys don’t cry.  So he didn’t.  No point.  But he resented those bright, confident, arrogant boys who led the pack, who decided who was in and who was out of their gang, who ran the show and picked the teams and got the girls.  He’d vowed that one day _he’d_ be the leader of the pack, and other people would flock to him.  They had, later, but after a while it hadn’t been the panacea he’d thought it would be.

He’d never been hungry, or unclad: never short of books.  There was a second-hand bookshop in every small provincial town, and he’d visited all of them.  No matter how plain their fare, his mother had always managed a few quarters so he could get a new book.  He remembers her not being hungry, or claiming to need to lose a pound or two to fit the latest costume.  So she’d said.  Even then, he’d known she lied.

He becomes aware that his hands are trembling, that his brow is sharply, painfully furrowed and there’s clawing tension in his shoulders and arms.  Still the memories come.

He worked his ass off for scholarships – and had to give up as many as he won when they moved again.  Every time, another desperate, biting need not to fail, not to let his mother down; to make it into a school that could teach him.  He learned not to fail, academically or at anything else.  The consequences were too painful.  He learned to read his mother’s face better than she ever knew: she couldn’t hide the small tells.  He’d used the same trick on Beckett.  But then she’d used it, today, back at him. 

The first pleasant memory of school in this long evening is the memory of the encouragement he’d had in one school from one of the few good friends he’d made: Damien, who’d first told him he could write, and that he had real talent. It had fired his ambition, and finally set him on a definite path.

He’d made it to college – a good one, too – on a scholarship: the first one he hadn’t had to move away from.  He’d met a girl – by that time, full six-foot-two and beginning to fill out across the shoulders, he’d started to meet a lot of girls – but this one had been different.  His Kyra, small and soft and cuddly: no need for him to be smart-aleck; he’d taken care of her and shared his hopes and dreams and fancies. He’d seen his forever reflected from Kyra’s eyes.  Pretty soon, he’d fallen deeply in love with her: so much so, he’d had no qualms when she invited him to meet her parents.  He should have realised that a reflection only shows you your own self.

Unnoticed, his fingers are gripping the fabric of his pants.

Her mother – hadn’t liked him.  There’s an understatement.  Oh-so-delicately edged comments; chipping at his meagre confidence, ridiculing his ambitions.  And then the reaction to his lack of a father.  She’d made it perfectly clear that a fatherless, illegitimate boy with no money, no family and a background in repertory theatre across the US was not what she expected for her darling, precious daughter; made it clear that in her view he’d never make it.  He’d been determined, after that, to show that he would, could make it. He’d gone back to the dorms, and  his stall in a bar, and begun.  Kyra had stuck with him, for a long while: but one day she’d told him she was going to Europe, and that she needed some space.  To this day he’s never understood what happened there, though he suspects her mother had a lot to do with it.  He’d got over it, eventually: a few casual girlfriends, never getting to the stage of meeting their parents, never feeling the depth of emotion that he had with Kyra.  And all the time, he kept writing, and editing, and rewriting, till one day he had, he found, a novel.

Now, he looks at that first effort with a highly critical eye.  The plot was too loose, a few too many unlikely coincidences, some rather overstated characterisation – but the dialogue was smart, and realistic, and the story was gripping.  He’d sent it, trepidatiously, after other rejections, to a then-small publisher called Black Pawn, and after a while gave up hope.  Until the letter landed on his mat: a contract, and a demand that he turn up at their offices.

The rest was history.  Age twenty-one – just – he was the next big thing.  A star, a celebrity, rich, handsome and _everybody_ loved him, everybody wanted him.  It was everything he’d ever wanted as a small child, as a lonely teen, and after Kyra.  He’d made it.  He was careful about the legalities, and careful to ensure that he kept his money under tight control. (though he hid that.  It didn’t fit the story he was building, the persona he was creating.) He never wanted to be poor again.  The first thing he did, though, was make his mother an allowance.  She was semi-successful then, her fame came later, but he could, and did, ensure she never had to struggle ever again.  Apart from that, though, fame went to his head.  He had a lot of so-called friends, and gradually he got dragged into a lifestyle that he should have avoided.  He’d taken drugs, and drunk too much, and woken up with too many women he didn’t know.

He’d quit the drugs, and most of the booze.  Writing mattered too much to ruin.  But he still had friends.  Everyone wanted to be his friend.  Everyone wanted to be with him.  He was astonishingly popular, and he revelled in it.  Age twenty-one, what do you expect?  Gradually, though, he began to notice the reality of the people around him.  It started small.  He’s a generous man, but it was always he who signed the check at the end of the night.    Conversation revolved around money, and gossip – nasty gossip: who’s out, and why; snide comments, put-downs.  He didn’t like that, didn’t like the way in which he felt a little more insecure as he went home from yet another evening out; but he didn’t know how to stop it without sounding like a prig; and besides which, these were his friends, and you put up with a certain amount of ragging from your friends.  Even if the men were like that, though, the women were always friendly.  Very friendly.  He learned a lot; and the more he learned, the more they liked him.  Shame that sooner or later each of them thought that they could entice him to marriage.  But none of them made him feel like Kyra had, none of them would have looked once, never mind twice, if he hadn’t been the latest star on the celebrity circuit, and none of them were, in the end, what he wanted. 

He wasn’t wholly satisfied with the crowd he mixed with, but he was popular and anyway he ran the show, just like he’d wanted to as a small boy who wasn’t in the in-crowd: he had control over this crowd, and he liked that.  But a few too many people wanted to use his talent and his fame – and his money – to launch themselves, and gradually he started to mistrust everyone who came his way.  He stopped being as open, started to look cynically on everyone’s motives, and thanked his stars that Black Pawn was honest.

Age twenty five, another bestseller or two under his belt, he was getting tired of the lifestyle.  The constant sardonic cynicism around him, the ever-more noticeable way in which he was bankrolling the gang, the endless offers of casual sex – he’d almost had surfeit of it.  He was starting to look around for something new, something better, when he saw her. 

In retrospect, he’d never had a hope of resisting.  A slim, unhappy redhead; a struggling actress who looked as if she’d not had a good meal for a month – he didn’t even know it pressed all his buttons.  He plucked her out the crowd and took her home, took care of her – matters took their course.  He was desperate to make her life better, frantically in love for the first time since Kyra, and when she whisperingly, uncertainly told him she thought she was in love with him too his joy was unconfined.  He showered romance upon her: travel, a home, a more-than comfortable lifestyle; they shared a scorching sex life, though she never seemed to enjoy affection as much as he would have liked.  Everything he couldn’t do for his mother when he was growing up, he could do for Meredith.  It only got better when she confirmed – he’d guessed - she was pregnant – he married her out of hand, whirlwind family: all the things he hadn’t had he’d give to Meredith and their baby.  No child of his would be fatherless.  Small niggles crept in, though.  She hated being pregnant, hated the changes in her body and not being able to work.  Her temper flared: she’d never used to lose it with him, but now he couldn’t do anything right.  Proximity seemed to have bred contempt, but absence – his, on book tours – didn’t make her heart grow fonder either.  He lost himself in writing another book, and she didn’t seem to care: he prepared their nursery: furniture, décor, equipment, chose a name: Alexander, his own middle name, for a boy; Alexis if a girl – Meredith had no interest.  She told him flatly she wouldn’t breast-feed, and he accepted it, still, he told himself, against all evidence, in love.  Still, he told himself, Meredith was in love with him.  And she would love their baby.

He did.  She didn’t.                                            

It took him a month to realise, so lost in the bliss of his baby he barely noticed that he was doing almost everything: stumbling, exhausted and exhilarated, from feed to diapers to naps (his and his Alexis’s both).  This small dependent human satisfied his every need to protect and care and love: he couldn’t get enough of her, couldn’t do enough for her.  There was no room for anything else except their little family: he didn’t want to go out; his previous, still childless, friends suddenly seemed shallow, and Meredith and Alexis needed him at home.  Well.  Alexis did.  Meredith was… different, somehow.  Not the woman she’d been before.  But he loved her still, so he told himself, so he accepted her complaints, stayed in so she could go out, (though he didn’t really want to go out anyway) and lavished all his immense capacity for love on Alexis, since Meredith didn’t seem to want it any more.  He was more successful than ever: every word he wrote was gold.  To the outside world, he had it all: success, fame, riches, talent, a beautiful wife and a beautiful baby.  But under it he knew that his family was falling apart, no matter what he did.  Nothing was enough to make Meredith love Alexis as much as he did, and nothing seemed to make her love him again.

In his heart, he knew that it was all going wrong, but he didn’t want to believe that his family could be a failure, so he did his best to ignore the signs, and gave both his girls everything he could: everything he was.

It all went south the day he asked Meredith to stay home with Alexis so he could go to a Black Pawn meeting.  His latest book was due out in a month: final tweaks to the cover and the publicity schedule needed dealt with.  He couldn’t get out of it, no matter how much Meredith protested.  The books, after all, were maintaining her lifestyle. 

He had opened the door quietly, not wanting to disturb Alexis’s nap, intending to sneak into the nursery and simply watch his baby for a moment.  He heard a soft hum of voices, and Meredith’s tinkling, crystalline laugh.  He shut the door equally softly, already sure that this was the end. 

He turns hard away from the memory of the next ten minutes.   He can’t face it, even now.  She left.  He stayed.  She didn’t fight him for Alexis.  Just as well.  She’d never have won.

Gradually, over the years, memory faded and they came to an accommodation.  He accepted that she really wasn’t cut out to be a parent, and, if not forgave, forgot: let her see Alexis – though that was nearly stopped forever the day Meredith took her to Paris, without telling him.  He’d been on the point of calling Interpol to have her arrested when she rang.  Still, he got past that too.  He expected complete self-absorption from her, and was rarely disappointed.  They fell into bed one night, after he’d had far too much whisky and too little companionship for too long, after another failed marriage, and found that that, at least, was something they still had in common.  It meant nothing, on either side, but the physical release was welcome, and the lack of meaning more so.  He hated himself, afterward, the first time.  After that, not so much.  She knew what he liked, and was perfectly happy to play along.  Occasionally, there were the soft, pretty, pink plastic women, their conversation and faces as vacuous and transient and simple as his need.

He stops the memories there, by sheer force of will.  He can’t deal with them.  He’d hoped for so much, and so often been disappointed in what he’d found.  So he’d stopped trying.  He knows that’s not half of it, but he’s ripped enough wounds open for one night.  He goes quietly to bed, and falls into a tormented sleep.

* * *

 

Beckett wakes for what feels like the fifteenth time in the very small hours of the morning and pads downstairs for some water, which she’d forgotten to take with her in the stress of the end of the day.  The cabin is dark and silent, until, suddenly, there comes an unexpectedly harsh noise from Castle’s room.  It sounds, in fact, like he’s having a nightmare.  She slips in, not prepared to let their unresolved issues prevent her making sure he’s okay, and sits down on the edge of the bed to put a comforting hand on his shoulder.  When that doesn’t really seem to help, she lies down beside him and snuggles in, arm over his broad back.  That works: his breathing calms and the restless motion ceases.

She doesn’t notice when she, too, falls into restful sleep, wrapped around Castle and surrounded by his familiar, comforting smell. 

Castle wakes with a feeling of surprise, rapidly tending to as much astonishment as his sleep-mazed brain can manage.  There seems to be a Beckett in his bed.  He’s fairly sure that wasn’t there last night.  Maybe he’s still asleep, in which case...  He turns over, tucks her into his chest, and closes his eyes again.  It’s a very realistic dream.  He definitely likes this dream.  He’ll stick with it.  He drifts back to sleep without ever having wholly realised that he’d been awake.

Beckett wakes up rather more slowly than normal and takes a few instants to realise that she’s not in her own bed and she’s not alone.  It takes another few instants for her to remember why.  She extracts herself very gently from Castle’s arm without waking him and pads quietly to the kitchen and the coffee.  Maybe the caffeine will clarify her thoughts.

She takes it out on to the porch and curls up in the morning sunshine.  They still need to talk.  But she doesn’t, she finally realises, need to force Castle to talk right now.  He’s not a suspect, or a witness, and this is not a case that she needs to solve as quickly as possible.  She sips her coffee in punctuation of the thought, and enjoys the warmth on her face.  They can take this a little more slowly.  They’ve got most of a fortnight, and they don’t need to push the pace.  In fact, they shouldn’t.  Some downtime, some peace, some companionship rather than the blazing sexual attraction that hadn’t quite pulled itself into a proper friendship before it all exploded because of her own demons.  Yes.  They need to learn to be friends, instead of just lovers. 

So, some time after she’s washed and dressed, when a yawning Castle peeks round the door, still sleep-tousled and looking rather like a large, untidy, teddy bear, she smiles entirely happily at him and tells him there’s water in the kettle and coffee, and mugs, on the counter.  He reappears a minute or two later clutching his own coffee and joins her on the bench.


	73. No more than an alibi

Castle expects an interrogation, or if not an actual interrogation at least an atmosphere closely resembling the precinct, where he’ll be expected to fall into the trap of talking to avoid silence.  Strangely, however, it doesn’t feel like that.  Beckett’s savouring her coffee, and wriggling her shoulders in the sunshine – and she’s wearing a spaghetti-strap top and a pair of denim cut-offs, with a ponytail, and sunglasses pushed back on her head.  She looks about eighteen.  She also looks utterly delicious, and relaxed.

“Hey,” she says, and takes a slurp of coffee.  It seems like that’s it. 

“Hey,” he says cautiously in reply.  There’s a space of quiet, in which the crickets chirp loudly.

“Can you fish?”  What?  No, he can’t fish.  No call for fishing skills in Manhattan.  Or small-town theatres, for that matter.

“Fish?” he stumbles out, sounding as confused as he is.

“Yeah.  I thought… maybe we could go for a hike; go to a pond my dad fishes in.  Take a couple of rods, see if we catch anything, enjoy the peace.  If we caught anything we could cook it.”  A hunter’s gleam flickers in her eyes.

“Fish?” he says again.  “You want to fish?”  Beckett grins.

“Yeah, Castle.  Fish.  You know, silvery wriggling swimming animals that live in ponds and rivers and the sea?”

“I know what a fish is.  I’ve just never been fishing.”  The next point dawns on him.  “I’ve never gutted a fish, either.”

“Don’t worry.  I’ll show you.  I’ve gutted lots.”  That doesn’t actually reassure Castle any.  He’s fine with gory crime scenes and bloodthirsty movies.  He’s not quite as sure that clubbing a fish on the head to kill it and then gutting it will appeal.  Or whatever you do with a fish.  His fish arrives neatly filleted and preferably on a restaurant plate, with a nice sauce and al dente vegetables.  And he’s still confused by the lack of interrogation.  Beckett’s still talking, he perceives.

“I usually take a book, and a picnic lunch.  Fishing’s not really about catching anything.  It’s an excuse so I can pretend I’ve done something all day.  If I come back with dinner, that’s a bonus.  If not, there’s food in the freezer.”

“Okay,” Castle agrees.  Before he knows where he’s at Beckett’s disappeared, returns with two rods, disappears again, for a little longer, returns with a backpack – no, two backpacks – and hands him one.

“Ready when you are, Castle.”  Oh.  Can he at least finish his coffee first?  He looks at his mug, looks at Beckett, looks at his coffee again – and then flicks a much more penetrating glance at Beckett when he thinks she isn’t looking.  For all the casual wear, look, and tone, there’s a slight – awkwardness?  Tension? – behind it.  Clearly this is about more than just a walk in the sunshine.  Equally clearly, it’s an olive branch.  The question, however, is whether Beckett is trying to rearrange their relationship somehow.   He’s pushed enough by following her here to have his say, it’s her turn to decide what’s happening now.  And what’s happening is a walk in the woods, with fishing rods, and a day spent, it seems, doing nothing in particular.  Maybe he’ll not be interrogated.  Maybe, if so, he can think about what Beckett had said.  But the thought of baring his soul to her claws through his gut.  What if she, like so many others, doesn’t want to know the real Rick Castle?

He’s very quiet as they walk through the cool green of the forest, feet falling softly on the leaf mulch lying on the trail.  Beckett doesn’t intrude on his thoughts, which is fortunate, because they’re in such disarray that she’d probably simply have him committed.  Little is clearer when they arrive in a clearing with which Beckett’s obviously familiar.  She produces a picnic rug, her Kindle and water, and pieces the fishing rods together.  Castle watches with interest – it’s considerably better than his roiling thoughts – and assists when asked.

Rods set up, lines trailing in the water, Beckett flops on to the rug, lying on her stomach, and smiles up in a non-threatening fashion. 

“You can sit down now, Castle.  Nothing to do except wait, and enjoy the sun.  Did you bring a book?”  She’s trying, very hard, not to do or say anything that would spoil their chances of a relaxed day.  Specifically, she’s trying to indicate without actually saying so – which would definitely spoil the day – that she doesn’t want to pressure him to talk until he’s ready.

Castle arranges himself next to Beckett with a small but significant gap between them, and reaches for the book he’d thrown in.  At first he keeps looking at the fishing rod, hoping that some hungry piscine will take the bait.  As nothing happens, he spends more time with the book.  Beckett’s lost in hers, and soon Castle follows, giving up on the hope of fish.  He only notices that Beckett’s dozing when he shifts position.  He puts the book down and goes back to thinking.

He wants Beckett.  Except that’s not true, and that’s been the problem all along.  He thought he only wanted her, and only because she wouldn’t play along, wouldn’t give him what he wanted, when really it was far more, from very early on.  He’s in love with her, which is not at all the same thing.  But he’s scared that if she sees who he really is: not the man she thinks she knows, the successful writer who, at least as an adult, had a perfect life; she won’t feel the same.  He’s scared of being in love, too.  It’s never ended well.  Still.  The heart of the matter is in what she said.  He hasn’t told her everything.  He’s barely told her anything, in fact, and he won’t think about that last, bitter betrayal even in the privacy of his own head.  But if she doesn’t know it, if he doesn’t tell her, it’s all going to be based on a lie. 

He cannot go into a relationship based on a lie again.  Especially when this time he’d be the one lying.

Well.  There’s his choice, then.  Talk, or accept that he’ll never have a relationship with her.  Making that decision doesn’t take away the cold void in his gut.  Make or break.  It’s all too likely to be break.  He needs to talk, but Beckett’s asleep, and he doesn’t want to talk, yet.  He won’t wake her, not for this.  He’ll just lie here beside her and enjoy the moment.  Maybe tonight, in the protective dark, where she can’t see his face.

Where he can’t see her face, watch it shifting to pity, or worse, contempt.  Where he can’t see it all fall apart, again.  Where he can hide from his own failure, and leave silently to return to the only person who’s never made him feel lesser, the only place he feels right.  But that last isn’t true, either.  Because in four months, he’s not just felt right when he’s at home, but he’s felt right in the precinct, too.  Not small, or lesser, or useless; not a celebrity, or a star, or a spoilt playboy.  But simply Castle, unadorned and unflattered: ragged without mercy, but valued for his contribution.  Not praised.  None of them go in for fulsome praise: a brief smile, a fist bump, a quick word: _good_ , or _nice work_ , and then move on to the next thing.   He won’t have that, either, if this falls apart.

He’s hoped so many things, dealing with Beckett.  Now he has to hope that she will understand, from the depths of her own lack of trust and the multiple betrayals visited upon her, why he became the man he did, why he retreated behind his PR shell.  For now, he’ll lie here, and watch the sky, and the clouds scudding across it.

Soon, his eyes close too.

When Beckett wakes, she’s somehow snuggled in against a sleeping Castle’s broad chest, wrapped in and with her head on his shoulder.  She decides that she likes this position very much, nestles in further, and closes her eyes again, just for a moment.  Castle’s chest is considerably more comfortable than the hard ground.  If pushed, she’d admit it smells better than the picnic rug, too.  Unfortunately, it seems her movement has roused him.  She doesn’t expect the instant tightening of his grip around her, as Castle instinctively pulls her fully over him and she ends up with her hands on his shoulders, looking down into his eyes. 

The emotion she sees there is _not_ the one she had expected.  Desire, possibly, affection, humour.  Maybe even... that thought trails off under the dark, bitter pain that she sees.  She realises he’s not embracing her, he’s clinging on like she’s the last spar floating from a ship that’s already sunk.  So she slips a little down, and puts her head back on his shoulder, letting him hold her to him as he needs to, for as long as he must.  When he finally lets go, she rolls off and takes his hand, lying tucked beside him and not speaking; leaving him to decide what, if anything, to say; making no demands.  Eventually she stands up, and goes to check the fishing lines.  As expected, there are no fish.

Castle is volubly disappointed, most of the walk back.  It would be very funny, and Beckett is sure it’s intended to amuse, if only it weren’t underpinned by a note of frenetic, forced humour.  She is also wholly sure that he’s using the flood tide of words to cover something a lot less pleasant.  Every detective sense she has is now screaming at her that Castle is concealing his real thoughts and history because he doesn’t like what he’s going to tell her.  Which implies that he thinks she won’t like it, and from the darkness of his eyes, she’ll react badly.  She doesn’t know how to tell him that whatever he may have played at being; the way he behaves with his daughter, and in the precinct, and under fire, and how he’d stepped back when the kidnap case demanded it; shows her far more about who he is than page six.  At least, she doesn’t know how to say that and make him believe her before he’s told her the rest.

Conversation is desultory and meaningless until after dinner.  Castle insists on cooking – mainly, Beckett thinks, to give himself something to focus on that isn’t his unhappy thoughts – and produces something that’s rather more impressive than she might have managed given the same eclectic collection of ingredients.  It doesn’t make dinner any more convivial, and by halfway through Beckett is wishing that there was a bottle of wine, or indeed any form of mind-altering substance, that would lower, or at least hide, the discomfort level.  Coffee doesn’t help matters, and while she sits down deliberately close that doesn’t improve anything either.  She’s quite seriously considering that the best option is to give Castle enough emotional and physical space that he can ponder on his own and not feel pressured, probably by going to her own room again, when he curls an arm round her shoulders and pulls her close into him, in the deepening gloom.

It takes him a long time to begin.  Castle knows he has to say something: that the longer he’s silent the less likely it is that Beckett will think that he’s in this with her; but he doesn’t know where to start.  It’s almost dark, when he finally does begin, with the relatively easier subject of the abuse.

“It wasn’t my mother.”  He feels Beckett come to attention next to him.  “I tried to do the right thing but all that happened was that we got in trouble.”  He sounds as if he’s still a child, looking at the situation from a position of powerlessness.  “I couldn’t fix it.  He made her do what he wanted, but she didn’t want it.”  The words drop heavily into the twilight.   He stops, and can’t find a way to start again.

“Castle,” Beckett says softly.  “You’re a storyteller.  Tell me the story, as if it were one of your books.  Just like it’s a story, and not about you at all.”  She pats his knee gently, snuggles closer and takes his hand.  “Now I’m sitting comfortably.  You can begin.”  There’s a pause, then a breath, then another.

“There are a lot of nooks and crannies backstage in the theatre, perfect for a small, lonely boy to hide in; perfect for losing himself in a book and being transported to a different world.  Sometimes, there’s the chance for him to watch rehearsal, and join a different world in another way. But in between the stage flats and the backdrops it’s possible to be completely hidden.  If he were older, he’d be the ghost in the machine.  It’s a strange life.  Nobody’s ever the same person twice, everybody changes their personality to go along with the role they are playing that week.  He’s used to moving on: a new cast, a new group.  The only constant is his mother.  No matter who she’s playing, no matter who with, she’s always the same with him.   She makes sure he’s warm, and comfortable, and loved.  When he’s old enough to understand, she makes sure he knows not to disturb rehearsal, or performance; instils manners and morals, spends as much time as she has reading to him.  Mostly scripts, where she affects all the voices, and all the parts.  As he gets bigger, he plays too: taking on the roles.  It’s all a game, when he’s small.  Inevitably, though, despite his mother’s efforts, he learns other things.  How to be charming to get what you want.  How to upstage, subtly.  How to be competitive.  And he learns to act.”  Ah.  Of course.  Beckett doesn’t say a word, simply sits and listens, letting the words fall softly into the night air, and the inviting silence. 

“A little older, and his mother teaches him about stranger-danger, and acceptable touching, and how to keep himself safe.  She teaches him that he shouldn’t ever be asked to keep secrets from her.  All the things a normal, loving mother would teach.  He notices that sometimes, around some people, she’s a bit tense, but he puts it down to needing the job, trying a little too hard.  By the time he’s ten, he’s a good actor.  No-one would know that he’s tired of moving, that his friends are largely imaginary, that he knows that his mother’s sometimes hungry, and she’s mending her skirt for the tenth time.”  Her heart clenches on the picture of what his life must have been.  She’s under no illusions that he’s telling her everything.  There are some very large gaps there, but she doesn’t need them filled in for her.  “He can sew, too.  A wardrobe mistress in Ohio taught him, same as the stagehands in Philly taught him to play poker and stack the deck.  He’s good at spotting and copying the many uses of make-up.  When he gets the chance, he plays at spies, and disguises, and borrows the greasepaints.  Acting, again.  Sometimes he even acts on stage, when there’s a need for a child.”  He’s getting caught up in his own story, dropping into the cadence of fiction.

“So one day, this miniature actor-spy, ten going on thirty, as smooth as Bond and twice as brave, is practising surveillance, a stake-out.  He’s got a book with him, and he’s lurking in a corner of the stage flats where he can’t quite be seen.  At first he’s pretending to read, eyes flicking round and clocking the stage and the cast, making little notes in a spiral bound notebook just like he imagines a real spy would do.  All he’d need to be perfectly happy would be a secret camera and recorder, just like Bond might have.  He’d love to meet Q.  All those wonderful gadgets…”  Beckett smiles.  She can see the small boy who loved gadgets in the man who has all the latest apps and tech.  Wearing the wire on the kidnap case must have been a dream come true.

“He’s just beginning to get bored, just like he thinks real spies must, wondering how they manage not to fall asleep, or get lost in a book or their newspaper – since they’re grown up, they must have a newspaper, though he doesn’t see the attraction – when a man and a woman come into view.  The spy’s excited.  Suddenly his subjects are in range.  He’d better not be seen.  He slithers silently further behind the backdrop, thankful he’d scoped out his site carefully to provide ample cover.  Of course he would: he’s a top operative.  Only the very best for this mission: national security is at stake.”

Beckett hears the man who loves way-out theories and crazy spy sub-plots; who thinks that the Mafia is merely another source, and gets away with it; the happy confidence that his insane hypotheses will have value.  _He learns to act_.  Oh yes.  Stories and imagination and acting.  Was there ever a real Rick Castle?  It sounds like there might not have been.  Or else the actor _is_ the only reality.  But somehow she doesn’t believe that.  She’s seen him with his daughter.  She understands his mother now, too, rather more fully.

“The woman’s a suspected foreign agent: a femme fatale, Mata Hari junior.  Her innocent looks and youth belie her craft, but make her cover as an ingénue perfectly convincing.  She’s dressed for the part, too, unassuming top and jeans, nothing to draw attention, nothing either too modest or too provocative.  Just an all-American girl, attractive but not stunning, bright but not blazingly intelligent.  She probably goes for burgers with her second-string football team boyfriend, sneaks a beer with him in the park under the stars.  Any other impression might blow her cover.  But who’s the man she’s with?  Her handler, her partner, or her mark?  The spy’s not sure.  Better for him to observe for longer, unseen.”

Beckett can feel the kernel of the story approaching, the nut within this shell.  She can see this tale unfolding, oh yes.  Hundreds of hours on Vice stakeouts and operations tells her the ending even now.  Not his mother.  One tiny, tiny consolation.  But she feels, couldn’t say why, that there’s more to this than simply the two people who thought themselves unobserved.  She consciously switches off her reactions and lets the flow of evocative words wash over her: the choppy, long/short sentences surprisingly effective in showing her the little boy, lost in his imaginary world where he can be the hero, building fictional scenarios.

“The man’s big, broad” – _oh, Castle.  No wonder you reacted as you did that first time in your loft, or after you threw the poker hand.  Oh, I see that_. – “intimidating, menacing, even from behind or occasionally in profile.  Short hair, clean shaven, smartly dressed, but somehow the spy knows that he’s fit, strong, probably carries concealed.  He’s got to be a handler, or another agent, trained in martial arts.  He’s displeased, though.  The agent isn’t doing something correctly.  Maybe she failed to make a drop, or missed a checkpoint.”  Beckett hears Castle’s breath hitch.  “That’s when it stops being a story, and a game.”  She’s certain of the next piece.

“He’s gripping her wrists, looks like a Chinese burn.”  How, Beckett wonders, did a ten year old Castle know what a Chinese burn looked like?  There are only two explanations for that.  She doesn’t like either of them, and she knows which one is more likely.  “She’s terrified, and hurting.  The little boy can see both on her face, but he knows that this isn’t acting.  Acting doesn’t leave marks.  The big man’s looking ugly: twisted satisfaction on his face, as if he’s taking a child’s sweets away.”  And now Beckett knows why Castle recognised a Chinese burn. 

“He’s talking quietly, but this is a theatre and the acoustics are such that, by some auditory trick, the watching, horrified little boy can hear every single malevolent word.”  In his dream, he hadn’t heard it.  “‘You know what you need to do if you want to keep this role.’  He’s smiling, but it’s unpleasant and cruel: it’s the alley tomcat toying with the broken-winged sparrow.  One hand moves across her chest, and she gasps, painfully.  ‘You need to be nice to me.  I can make or break you.  There are a hundred girls just like you who can take this part.  So you’d better make it worth my while to give you it.’  He’s pulled her closer, his hands wandering freely, his mouth slobbering over hers.  The little boy knows that this is what his mother had warned him wasn’t allowable, that he should always tell her about.  The girl’s crying now, not resisting or fighting or making noise, only slow resigned misery and desolate acceptance, nodding.  ‘Be in my room after the curtain.  Or else you’ll be looking for another role.”  And he lets her go.”  Awful.  Entirely expected, and horribly traumatic.  But there’s far more to this than he’s said. 

“The big man turns around, and the child sees his face.  It’s the star of the show, the handsome, heroic, male lead.  The one who’s patted the small boy on the head, and tossed him casual praise, the object of his childish worship, even, in his little-boy dreams, a father figure.  It’s all dead now.  There’s vicious satisfaction on his face, the expression of the chief bully, the leader of the jackal pack.  He peers coldly around, as if he’s seen a faint movement, or heard a sound.  The small boy stays as motionless as a harvest mouse when the buzzard circles.  Finally, the big man leaves, and the boy scrambles for the haven of his mother.”


	74. A new set of lies

“He rushes into the front of house area, breathless and frightened.  But the placing rehearsal was still going on, and he’d been well taught never to interrupt a rehearsal.  His mother had been kind about it.  Others had not.  He’d learned fast.”  Beckett thinks how, in the precinct at least, Castle never made the same mistake twice.  Only with her.  But then, she’d made the same mistake over and over with him.  She conceals her wince.  “Never get in the way of the show.  Be quiet, and keep out the way. Don’t be noticed.”  That’s rather interesting.  Castle’s later life has been anything but discreet, quiet and unnoticeable.

“It never occurs to him that discretion might be the better part of valour, even if he’d ever heard of the concept.  Theatre people are open about everything, he’s thought.  Nobody keeps anything secret.  He knows rather more than a ten-year old should about many things.  All he’s ever seen and heard are loud, histrionic scenes.  And he certainly isn’t paying any attention to which of the cast are on the stage, or in the wings.  He’s forgotten that the final scenes involve almost everyone.” 

Beckett suddenly sees the whole circus in 3D Technicolor before Castle even opens his mouth again.  She stays silent by main force, but she’s gripping his hand hard enough to bruise.  He’s so lost in his own memories that he doesn’t even notice.

“As soon as everyone’s come down from the stage and is milling around the stalls, he starts, from ten feet away, disastrously distant and appallingly audible – he was taught to project, for God’s sake, and he does – he tells his mother the whole story.  Everyone can hear it.  Including the leading man.”  Oh _God_ , Castle.

“It was mayhem.”  He’s dropped out of the story into hard reality.  “You’d never heard such a noise.  Everyone yelling, Mother trying to get to me, the leading man in an attitude of disbelief, centre stage.  Nobody believed a word of it.  Except maybe Mother.  Everybody just kept shouting at me, as if it was my fault.  I’d always thought – Mother always told me - if you did the right thing and told the truth it would all turn out right.  George Washington and his apocryphal cherry tree.  _I cannot tell a lie_.  A good myth for small children.”  Old, bitter pain soaks his words, and more: Beckett can hear the moment his first illusions shattered around him.  “Even Mother started to look as if I might have been wrong.  But then, everyone was yelling at her too.”  He turns right away from Beckett and pulls his hand free.

“So I said I’d made it up.  That it was just a story.  That I’d got carried away.  Everybody stopped shouting, then.  But I can still see Mother’s face.  I think she knew I’d been telling the truth.  But she just looked so relieved...”  he trails off, stands up, paces, sits again.  There’s more even than that, Beckett knows.  “It meant she wouldn’t be sacked.  But later... the male lead was quite well known.  Well connected.  He and the producer called Mother and me in, later.  He made it very clear that if I ever repeated it, ever accused him again, she’d be lucky to get a theatre job cleaning the restrooms, anywhere north of Alabama.  She thought I was asleep, that night.  She wept.  All night.  I never mentioned it ever again.  Not any of it.  Not the casual mauling, or the drugs, or the rapes.  When I was upset, Mother told me it was just a nightmare, consoled me with comforting lies.  Not that anyone would call it that.”  He stops, still turned away, agony in his voice and shoulders.

“It wasn’t my mother.  But it could have been.  Maybe it was.  How do I know my father wasn’t someone like that leading man?  My mother would hardly have told me anything _except_ comforting stories.  I promised myself I’d never be like that.”  His voice falls away almost to nothing.  “But with you I was.”

“No.  You were _not_ that man.  You have never been that man, Castle.”  She forces his head back round.  “Listen to me.  You stopped.  You _stopped_ , Castle.  And that makes you _not that man_.”

“I couldn’t stop it.   I couldn’t stop him hurting her.  I couldn’t stop any of it hurting any of them. I convinced myself it had all been a dream, because then I could stop feeling guilty about the girl.  I could have done something about him, when I grew up.  But I convinced myself it was a dream and never did.   I could have saved them.  You save people.  I don’t.” 

“You saved my life.”  In more ways than simply the obvious.

She doesn’t think he heard her.  She doesn’t think he’s hearing anything that’s on the outside of his own head right now.  And she’s absolutely certain he doesn’t know what he’s just said, because she’s absolutely certain he doesn’t know he said it out loud.  He was _ten years old_.  He couldn’t have helped anyone at ten years old.  Even if he’d gone to the local cops it wouldn’t have mattered, because in 1979 no-one on God’s green earth would have believed a ten-year old over an entire cast of adults, no doubt including the victim.  She strongly considers shaking sense into him, and then realises that that’s a particularly stupid thought.  Instead, she firmly takes his hand back, and strokes it softly.  He turns round, and lifts her into his lap, holding her close for his own comfort, not for hers.

“It’s late now, Castle.  Enough for one night.”  He’s only too happy to stop.  But he can’t let go of her: right now, she’s the comfort blanket he’d never had.  They’d had to travel light.  She’s suddenly strong enough for both of them, when he can’t even be strong enough to face up to the rest of his past.

“Castle?” She sounds tentative.  “Castle, would you like me to stay with you?”  He nods.  Speech appears beyond him.  This is not catharsis, it’s merely the beginning.  It hasn’t escaped Beckett’s notice that although this was a sufficiently dreadful story to explain Castle’s pathological need to have her consent, and his appalled reaction whenever he thought he hadn’t, that it in no way explains how he’d turned into a spoilt playboy who thought that people would give him anything he wanted just because he wanted it.  In fact, those two things really do not fit together at all.  But now is very much not the time for that.

“Okay.  I’m going to go and wash and then I’ll come back.”  He lets her go, reluctantly.  She’s as quick as she can be.  He’d made her forget, on more than one occasion, taken the stress and the difficulty from her.  She can hardly do less for him.   

When she returns only the small lamp on the side of the bed where there’s a space for her is still lit; and Castle’s broad back is turned to her; to, she thinks, the world.  She slides in, drapes a slim arm over him, and tucks in, placing a neutral peck-kiss on the back of his neck.  There’s so little reaction he might already have been asleep, if it weren’t for the tension clenched in his back and the scrape of his breathing.  His history is tearing him apart.  She remembers, hi-fidelity sharp, how she’d thought he couldn’t understand her pain, because he’d got it all, his perfect life.  He’d said, later that same evening, _we didn’t have anything.  Nothing._   It was she, who hadn't understood.  Swift shame slaps at her, and she moves closer.  Sleep overtakes her long before there’s any change to the harsh respiration beside her, and she doesn’t know that once she’s safely asleep Castle turns and holds her to him, breathing in the scent of Beckett to calm his drumming heart, trying to find protection from his past in what he hopes will become his present.

* * *

 

Castle wakes, heavy and unrefreshed, alone, to the dull clunk of stoneware mugs on the kitchen counter and the hiss of a boiling kettle.  It’s not sufficient for him to want to face the day.  He turns his back to the door and pulls the covers up around his neck, over his ears; shuts his eyes and chases sleep.  He hears soft footsteps, a smothered squeak and curse, the sharp click of a mug hitting the nightstand, the delicate pop of Beckett sucking a finger.  She’s put coffee by his head, and scalded a finger doing it.  Seconds later, there’s a matching click and the bed quivers as she slips back into the warmth and seeks him out.  It’s his turn to squawk.  Her feet are _freezing_.  The shock takes his mind off his memories and on to his present, trivial, woe.

“Thought you were awake,” Beckett says smugly.

“That was mean, Beckett.  Your feet are icy.  Take your nasty cold feet off me.”

“Nope.”  She sounds about five.  “You’re nice and warm.”  She tries to cuddle up.  Castle squawks again and moves away.

“Your hands are cold.  You’re cold all over.  Ugh.  You’re not Beckett,” he says as childishly as she, “you’re a frog.  Cold and clammy.  Ugh.”

Where he can’t see it, Beckett is smiling to herself.  She hadn’t meant to get quite so chilled, but she’s been awake, sitting outside in the early morning light, already one mugful of coffee to the good, and pensively thinking over last night’s commentary.  She’d also decided that Castle was likely brooding on it, and when she realised she was cold, and that Castle, and bed, would be nice and warm, she’d alighted on a way to take his mind off his story.  What’s more, it seems to be working.  It’s the first playful-Castle flavoured words he’s said since he arrived here three days ago.  Okay, so that wasn’t a good thought.  She knows why he wasn’t playful when he came.  She shivers, and Castle wraps himself round her.

“You really are cold.”  He sounds surprised.  “C’mere, and I’ll warm you up.”  He tugs her into him, and shudders theatrically.  “I’ll keep you warm at the expense of freezing to death myself.”  Beckett mutters darkly and equally theatrically about the unlikelihood of that happening but the potential advantages of his larynx freezing solid; and snuggles in closer.  Somewhat to her surprise, and a little disappointment, he sticks to a cosy cuddle, rather than anything more… enthusiastic.  Then again, they need to fix this, not bury it in scorching sex.  She enjoys, and reciprocates, the gentle affection and doesn’t attempt anything that might lead to more.  Once she’s warm again she wriggles into sitting up, discovers it’s past nine, much to her amazement, and inhales her coffee.  Castle grumbles but does much the same, and though he grumbles further about getting up it’s fairly clear that both of them do not want to stay in bed.  Too much opportunity to _not_ fix it, and to forget all the still-unresolved chapters of their histories.  Well.  Castle’s history, anyway.  Beckett’s appears to be out in the open.  Has been for some time, it seems.  She’s still quite happy that she’s told him everything she can.

The day passes much the same as the previous day had: fishing is replaced by a re-supply trip to the nearest town, which includes some wine by mutual and completely unspoken agreement, and then a hike in a different direction from yesterday’s pond.  Beckett displays an impressive knowledge of the flora and occasional fauna around them, and Castle occupies himself in holding her hand, or placing an arm around her shoulders, and pretending he spots whatever she’s pointing out.

“Look, Castle, there’s a Lesser Spotted Oriole!”

“Really?  Where?”

“Over there, on that branch.”  Castle peers hopefully.  Whatever it is, Beckett’s clearly excited about it.  All he can see is something vaguely bird-like.  At least, it probably has wings.

“I see it.”  At which point he becomes aware that Beckett’s sniggering.  “I don’t think it’s a Lesser Spotted Oriole,” he points out.  “I think it’s something else.  A dead branch, possibly.”  There’s another snigger.

“I wondered when you’d stop pretending you could see whatever I told you I could see.  You don’t do that in Manhattan.”

Castle grins in a particularly irritating fashion.  “I wondered when you’d stop trying to catch me out.  It’s been interesting to listen to.  I really liked the Lesser Spotted Oriole, though.  Nearly believable.”

Beckett rolls her eyes in a way he hasn’t seen in a week and growls softly.  He hugs her in a little closer.  He knows what she’s trying to do – distract him – and even if it isn’t really working it’s an improvement on the last few days.  Unfortunately they’ve turned for home and he knows that he’ll have to come up with the next piece of his history.  Not because Beckett is asking – she’s not asking very loudly and the effort that she’s making to make him feel that he doesn’t have to talk till he’s ready is palpable.  It’s nice that she’s not treating him like a suspect.  It’s not so nice that there’s still this barrier between them and it’s down to him to break it.  How come it’s he who’s hiding behind walls?  That’s been Beckett’s trick for four months.  Oh.  He could see her walls.  He couldn’t see his own.

Dinner is almost as uncomfortably silent as the night before.  Castle’s shutting down, retreating into himself.  Bracing himself.  Beckett, used to watching reluctant witnesses steeling themselves to confession of minor peccadilloes, recognises all the signs of another major revelation that Castle isn’t going to like making.  She pours him more wine, and after an instant’s hesitation tops up her own glass.  Like any reluctant witness, he has to build up to the real meat of the story.  Like any reluctant witness, he’s scared of the implications of what he’s telling her.  And like every reluctant witness, in the end he’ll spill.

They’re arranged on the couch, Beckett holding his hand: his other white-knuckled around the wineglass.  Heavily, he starts.

“Are you sitting comfortably?  Then I’ll begin.”  There’s a twist to his mouth at the line, as if there’s a sour joke that Beckett doesn’t get, that leaves a bitter aftertaste.  “Let me tell you a story.  It starts, as all good stories start, once upon a time.”  She doesn’t comment, recognising that he’s using the old line as a distancing technique.  She curls up a little closer, holds his hand a little tighter.

“Once upon a time, there was a young boy and his mother.  No father.  It didn’t matter.  The boy was much loved by his mother, and in return he loved her unconditionally too.  Just as well.  They had a hard life, travelling from place to place, his mother looking for work in the theatre – she was an actress.  Or a waitress, or a cleaner, when there was no role, though that was rare.  She was a good actress, not just in her son’s eyes.  But even being a good actress didn’t mean that the plays were good.  They ran for a few weeks.  The best ones for several months.  And then the boy and his mother would move on.  Always moving on: another town, another train, or Greyhound.  Money always tight: mended clothes, plain food.   The smell of mac-n-cheese brings it back to him, as if it were yesterday.”  Beckett wonders how he can bear to cook, or eat, any form of pasta, and what he did the first time a small Alexis must have asked for mac-n-cheese.

“His mother eats like a sparrow, and claims she’s never hungry.  He has the appetite of any normal growing boy, and he’s never left to go hungry.  They stay in a succession of cheap boarding houses, sharing a room.  He hangs around the theatres, and a number of people pet and cosset him when he’s small and cute.  His mother sometimes calls them nannies, but in truth it’s just whichever ingénue is free and will be happy to take a couple of dollars an hour for minding him.  She could never have afforded a nanny.  He wants to know the stories that he sees on stage, and they tell him.  He’s fascinated by the stories, wants more, and more.  In self-defence they teach him to read.  If nothing else, it stops him interrupting rehearsal.  His mother reads him a story every night, though, before the curtain goes up.  It’s their ritual.”  Beckett rubs her thumb against the back of his hand.  This story isn’t – yet – bad.  Sad, but not bad.

“Trouble starts when the boy starts school.  He’s bright, and enthusiastic, and he can already read.  He wants to learn, like most small children; wants to please his teacher.  He loved his kindergarten teacher – the first one.  He cried when they left that town.  The next time he cried less.  The third time he didn’t cry.  The fourth time he just accepted it.  Every kindergarten does it a little differently: recess arranged in a different way, new toys, new rules.  Some teachers were pleased he could read.  Some didn’t believe it, and were anything from mildly confused to annoyed when they had to change their view.  A few actively disliked it, and let it show.”  Beckett’s met other professionals like that along the way.  Interagency co-operation isn’t always quite what it should be.  Not everyone likes meeting someone better or smarter than they think that person should be.

“But moving on means that our little boy has to give up his friends.  Being able to read doesn’t – yet, he’s only five – mean he can write.  He makes new friends, and gives them up too.  Over and over and over again.  He learns that there’s no point in getting too close to people: you only have to give them up soon.  Only family endures: everything else is transient.”  Ah.  Thus his mother, thus Alexis.  Family matters, more than anything, because it’s the only constant in his life.  So why, then, two failed marriages and a host of casual affairs?

“Another school year starts.  This year it’s a little harder to keep making friends; a little more difficult to keep up with the constant minor changes of rules and teachers.  He tries, but too often he’s in trouble for not knowing things that were taught before he arrived.  Still, he’s still young enough to want to please, so he works hard, and catches up.  He learns to hide it, though.  Even this early, he’s found out that _teacher’s pet_ (in some rougher schools, _ass-kisser_ ) is not a good name.”  Beckett compares to her own grade school days and doesn’t like the answer she comes up with.  She sees where this might go. 

“And so on.  By fourth grade every new school is cause for fear.  Wherever he goes, he’s got the wrong background, the wrong curriculum.  He can’t play games, because he’s never been anywhere long enough to join a team, and there aren’t any pick-up teams round the theatres.  He’s got the wrong accent.  Educated East Coast neutral is wrong in every hick town across corn-belt America.  Being able to project across a theatre isn’t helpful either.  His voice can be picked out in the schoolyard at a hundred yards.  He knows nothing about baseball, or football.  The ability to make friends seems to have deserted him.  He’s lonely.  Now, we’d say he was bullied.”  The frozen tone, blandly icy, emotionless, tells Beckett more than she needs to know.  Her hand bites on his.  She’d always been popular.

“But our hero” – there’s a sharp edge on that – “is clever.  He notices that theatre audiences like the clown, like slapstick, like funny, smartass boys.  So that’s what he becomes.  And suddenly he’s able to make friends again.”  _Being whoever I needed to be to be liked_ rings in her head.  How he behaves in the precinct slides into perfect alignment in her mind.  He’d wanted to be liked by Ryan and Esposito.  And he’d made it happen, very quickly.

“He’s a hanger-on, the court jester, the Fool.  But he’s got friends: people paying attention to him.  The teachers hate him for his smart mouth, but his grades don’t slip.  He can’t afford for his grades to slip.  He can’t afford for his – friends – to find out how hard he works.”  He pauses.  “He knows they’re not really friends.  They won’t be there when the chips are down.  But it’s better than the alternative.  Better than the loneliness, and the bruises.  And outside school he retreats into books and fantasies.  And still they keep moving on from place to place.”  Beckett looks at Castle’s bleak face, turned inward to some old movie only he can see, and moves her hand from his to round his shoulders.  The small lonely boy is very evident.  The reason for the hard, sophisticated shell is also evident.

“And then it was nearly time for high school.”


	75. One is the loneliest number

That sounds ominous.  Still, none of it is as bad as last night’s story.  _Not yet_ , say her fears.  _Maybe it won’t be_ , says her conscious mind.  It’s not great at all, but last night was appalling.  Maybe that had been the worst of it?  But the way he says _high school_ sends waves of worry down her spine.  _She_ had always been popular, confident – no-one who gets into Stuyvesant is timid – high achieving.  She hadn’t gone in for teen-girl nasty, but then she’d never felt any need or desire to.  She had plenty friends, and a stable family, and she’d been perfectly comfortable in her own skin.  It hadn’t hurt that she was already… well, hot.  Her mind drifts for an instant: she’d had a perfect life, up till nineteen.  Castle had had a perfect life – she had thought – _after_ college.  She’s rather beginning to wonder about that too.  _You save people.  I don’t_ sounds less than ideal.  She forces her mind away from comparisons.  Castle deserves, and needs, her full attention.

“At the beginning of sixth grade, a more than usually perceptive teacher suggested to his mother that he should sit for scholarships for junior high.  She thought he had some talent for English, and he was all-round bright, so it was worth trying.  It was the first time that he’d heard it from an adult.  Part of his role as class entertainer was telling stories to his friends, who seemed to like them: the more lurid the better.  So he did.  And much to his mother’s delight, he won them.  But soon enough they had to move on. Another town, another test, another school.” 

Beckett cannot imagine the pressure.  She can’t think that Castle, as close as he had evidently been to the hard reality of a hardscrabble existence, hadn’t understood how much rode on his succeeding.  On not failing.  When failing is such a disaster, you learn to hate it.  You’ll do nearly anything not to fail.  Including, she abruptly realises, manipulating events to avoid it, chasing after the woman you love past the point of any reason or sense, far past the point where any normal man would have cut his losses, accepted failure and walked away; rebuilding your life into one that gives you self-respect; all the time proving that you’re good enough, clever enough, strong enough – simply _enough_.  Always needing to win, so that you never fail.

“At almost fourteen, a much-decorated veteran of the scholarship wars, his mother decided he needed stability, and to relax their dependence on each other.  It probably was unhealthy, for each of them to be so all-in-all reliant on only each other, and she didn’t want to lean on a child – it’s not fair: the child should lean on her.  He’d sat for a school called Edgewyck.  He hadn’t known – his mother had deliberately kept from him – that it was a boarding school.  When he won a full scholarship his fate was sealed.”  There’s an expression on Castle’s face that Beckett last saw on the face of her murdered eco-terrorist’s husband.  Hopeless, uncomprehending, betrayal.  It’s not yet dark enough to hide it, though she’s sure he’d like to.

“I couldn’t believe she was sending me away.”  Beckett hears _from her_ , or maybe _from our family_ , all two of them.  He gathers himself from that moment of personal memory, and returns to the depersonalisation of his fictionalised tale.  “He was devastated.  His mother kept a brave face, and for once, made stupid by misery, the boy couldn’t see through it.  He thought she wanted him gone, wanted to be free of his limiting, restrictive presence.  She’d not been to a first-night party, or cast celebration, that he could remember.  He withdrew, into himself, his books, his stories: a fantasy that he’d be a success and _everyone_ would love him.  No-one would leave him, or push him away, or send him away, ever again.  Not till he was ready to leave.” 

Another piece of evidence falls into place.  No wonder he’d never let her shut him out, or push him away.  Other men might show steel by walking away when badly treated (she winces): he regards it as an insult and refuses to be pushed away.  Because no-one who cared for him would ever be allowed to push him away till he was ready to go.

“Of course that was just a fantasy.  Life’s not like that.”  But it became so, didn’t it?  Except – Beckett thinks about his two divorces.

“Our hero went, barely able to kiss his mother goodbye.  It was hellish for him.  Lonely, friendless, and too miserable in those first weeks to establish himself as the clown.  He missed his mother terribly, and couldn’t or wouldn’t admit it.  Did you know you can be homesick even if you’ve never had a home?”

“No,” Beckett murmurs, soft response to keep him talking.  Poor lonely boy.  So much explained.  She’ll think about what she’s heard later.  No room for emotion now, it won’t help and it won’t allow Castle to keep talking.  Pity won’t be welcomed any more by Castle than she would welcome it herself.

“One day, months later, an older boy found our unhappy new boy.  Damien, he was called.  Not a name you associate with saviours, really – more bad omens.”  There’s a quick, edgy flash of teeth.  Some people might have called it a smile.  Beckett picks up the reference without a hitch, and pats his shoulder in acknowledgement with an answering smile of her own.  A large hand slides over her free one.

“He edited the school magazine.  He’d liked our hero’s submission.  Thought it had potential.  Thought _he_ had potential.  And he encouraged and pushed and kicked my ass and made me a writer.  If it hadn’t been for him…” he trails off.  There are a lot of possibilities implicit in the tone of that trailing off.  All of them are unpleasant.  One of them is tragic.

“He saved me.  Writing saved me.  I made friends, after that: remembered how.  Smartass comments, charming class clown.  It worked just as well at fourteen, fifteen, as when I was nine.  And for the first time in years, I was sad to move on.  But the scholarship ran out – time limited, not that I wasn’t good enough.”  No.  Beckett is absolutely sure of that.  He’d have made himself good enough.  “Mother had moved to Manhattan, and was enjoying some success.  Time to rejoin her.  But it was never the same.  I knew why she did it, and I could accept that she was right – but even when I forgave her it was never quite the same.”  Beckett just bets not.  Her father is sober now, but it’s not the same as it was before either.

“So I” – Beckett notes that he’s given up pretending it’s a story – “started on the scholarship treadmill again, in Manhattan.  It was a lot harder, here.  Lots of clever kids.  I worked my ass off, but those scholarships were only for a year.”  Beckett makes a suppressed noise.

“I thought your PR said you’d been thrown out of most of the best Manhattan establishments?”  He starts, under her circling arm, and the hand that’s still on hers contracts and grips, slowly relaxes.

“Being expelled is so much better a story - fits a bad-boy image. Makes you sound interesting, dangerous, attractively naughty. Certainly better than explaining how you were always moving on.  It sold books.  Scholarship kid doesn’t.  I didn’t even lie.  I just said I’d left them.  So I had.  The press made the rest up, but it worked.  Why try to correct them?  Everyone loves a bad boy.”  Suddenly he smiles wickedly.  “You do, Beckett.  His thumb strokes over her hand, and suddenly there’s heat and desire burning in the air, using up the oxygen.  He turns her sideways to detach her arm from his shoulder and drop her into his lap without actually causing her an injury.  Once she’s there he keeps her firmly tucked in.  She essays a little wriggle – tonight’s revelations are clearly not, despite her fears, as painful as yesterday’s, and Castle is clearly currently more inclined to something less platonic than last night.  So is she.  He’s talking, and that’s all that matters.  He’s trying to play fair.  The wriggle has exactly the effect she expects.  He pulls her in closer, trapping her there.

“I got into a good college, majored in English – what else? I’d grown from the small child to my current, ruggedly handsome” – his lips twist in a facsimile of a smirk, but there’s no smug, confident vanity behind it, rather disdain for how shallow the people around him had been – “self, but it was just the same as at high school.  No-one was interested in intelligence, or what I was reading, or anything except the jocks or charming, bad-boy Rick.  So that’s who I was.  It didn’t matter, though.  Plenty girls liked me, by sophomore year.  It was a nice change.”  Beckett’s sure of that.  She mentally subtracts twenty years from his face and comes up with an answer that screams _popular with girls_.  She’s certain that it also has a lot to do with his undoubted ability to understand people - women – he’d grown up surrounded by women in the theatre, she thinks, so he was probably a lot better tuned in than most college boys.  He’s certainly a lot better tuned in than most adult men.

“In the background I was still writing, but not so much.  I wanted to be a writer, but I was having a good time too.  It was really simple to be bad-boy, smartass, popular Rick.  No need to provide candy or illicit booze” – sorry?  Castle had bought his way into friendship at high school?  And grade school, by the sounds of it.  She doesn’t like that picture at all.  It should never have been necessary.  He’d said something, yesterday… it floats back into her mind.  _Taking a child’s sweets away_.  Ah.  And earlier in this conversation.  _Now, we’d say he was bullied_.  Classic.  Absolutely classic story and behaviour.  Define _being liked_ , Castle.  Because this sure doesn’t fit with Beckett’s definition.

“Then I met Kyra.”  Beckett’s senses go on full alert.  Simply the way his mouth shapes her name tells Beckett that Kyra was important.  _First real love, Castle?_ “She was different.  Real.  And when I was with her so could I be.  I didn’t have to be anyone except who I was.”  _So what went wrong, later?  If you were real then, how come you changed back to the shell?_  

“She encouraged me, just like Damien had.  I wanted to do better, because of her.  I really tried.”  His voice drops into a whisper, barely audible.  “I loved her so much.”  Sadness spills out of his eyes.  “It wouldn’t have lasted, probably.”  Beckett feels the fist in her gut, and sternly commands it to be gone.  She has no need to be jealous of a twenty-year dead romance.  Now is what matters.

“We were pretty serious.  She invited me to meet her parents, so I washed and brushed up very tidily, all unassuming and polite and ready to make a good impression.  All for Kyra.  Her family meant a lot to her, just like my mother had meant a lot to me.”  Hold on there, Castle.  _Had_ meant a lot to you?  Beckett inadvertently makes a questioning noise.

“Oh.  Yeah.  That.”  Not informative, Castle.  In fact, a frog-like leap over a gaping ditch.  With considerable effort, Beckett doesn’t push on that door.  She reminds herself again, hard, that Castle is not a witness or a suspect and is _not_ here to be interrogated.  It’s his story, his history, and it’s up to him what and how he tells her.  It’s just that she wants to call him on every leap and evasion: every tiny clue.  She mustn’t.  He hadn’t called her out – though she hadn’t deliberately missed out anything either.  If he asks her, she’ll answer, but there’s nothing much left to give.  But astoundingly, it seems he’s going back to fill that in.

“After I met Kyra, I asked Mother about my father.”  Oh, Castle.  That surely didn’t go well.  Beckett knows from his PR that he never knew his father.  “She brushed me off.  Wouldn’t tell me anything.  Claimed it was an instant, blinding attraction” – hmm.  Instant attraction isn’t a genetic trait, is it? – “but in the morning he was gone.  For years it didn’t bother me: I could imagine him as anyone I liked: famous, or a top spy, or – well, anything.”  _Except a loving, present father, Castle.  Anything except what you really wanted.  Anything except that leading man.  How your fantasy world must have sustained you._   Beckett remembers how much it had hurt the day she realised that her father loved Jim Beam more than he loved her.  And she’d had nineteen, almost twenty years of loving parents.  _Which is maybe why it hurt so much, Kate.  Did you ever think of that?  That you walled up because it hurt so much, because you knew what you once had?_   Another thought to push away.

“I kept pushing.  I needed some answers: I wanted to be able to tell Kyra something better, something that didn’t make my mother sound like a cheap one-night stand, too careless or too stupid or too drunk to protect herself.  She wouldn’t tell me anything.  Claimed she couldn’t.  It turned into a worse fight than when she sent me away.  I said some things – I made her _cry_ , Beckett, and I was so angry I didn’t even care.  All I could see was that she was hiding something and wouldn’t tell me.  I stormed out, back to the dorms.  I didn’t contact her for weeks.  Months.  I thought… I felt she’d let me down again, just like when she sent me to Edgewyck.  I couldn’t bear to see her.” 

Beckett hears what Castle isn’t articulating: _I felt she didn’t love me enough to tell me the truth._   She knows Castle has a temper of his own.  Now she knows why her refusal to talk, open up, had pushed his buttons, why he’d pushed on her history, why he’d started down the track of her mother’s case.  He’d had to find the truth, for her, that he hadn’t found for himself.  She wonders, suddenly, whether if his mother had – had been able to?  She’s not wholly convinced that his mother knows nothing – told him anything Castle would have been as obsessive about finding his father as she had been about solving her mother’s murder.  Another thought to park for later.

“Anyway.  Kyra invited me to meet her parents.  It… didn’t go so well.  They turned out to be high society, and Kyra was the apple of their eye.  I don’t think that anyone she brought home would have been good enough.  Her mother…”  Castle shudders, and Beckett brings an arm up round his neck in swift, comforting reaction.  “Her mother was a complete bitch, but you had to be present to notice.  Delicate questions, designed to prove how inferior, how unsuitable, I was.  You must have met them, Beckett?  Society women who can destroy your confidence in three sentences?  She hit every single insecurity point-perfect, and then twisted a salted stiletto in the wounds.  And then she asked about my parents and it all went to hell in a very polite hand basket.  It was clear she was never, ever going to like me.” 

Beckett’s met plenty of that sort of person – not just women, either - but she has the background and the social confidence to play them at their own game.  She might not belong in the world of expensive, diamond draped fundraisers with any confidence, but she can deal with anything up to that point without a qualm.  She’d have been just fine dealing with everyone at the fundraiser if it hadn’t actually been _in_ a black-tie event.  She holds Castle a little tighter.

“Amazingly, Kyra didn’t ditch me there and then, though I’m sure that was her mother’s intention – she made no secret of it.  Told me bluntly, when Kyra was out the room, that I’d never make it.  I’d end up homeless or teaching in a third-rate college in Podunk, Ohio.”  He shakes his head, and says irrelevantly,  “If there even is a college in Podunk, Ohio.  According to her I had no character.  Seemed like to her if your family was… irregular… then you couldn’t possibly have a single good quality.  I didn’t say anything.  I should have.  I should have defended my mother.  Instead I just left, when Kyra came back.”  Beckett’s heart turns over.  Though it would have taken extraordinary bravery to start that fight.  She’s sure that she couldn’t have, age nineteen, either.

“I went to apologise to Mother the next day.  Whatever she’d done, whoever it was with, she loved me, she’d done everything in her power to do her best for me, she’d sacrificed enough for ten mothers, and I should never have said what I did.  I never let anyone criticise her or put her down in my hearing ever again.”  He makes a face.  “I couldn’t do much about the theatre critics, though.  Then.”  There’s a vicious smile.  “Later, though… Criticism of her performance was one thing, that’s their job.  Anyone who strayed into her off-stage affairs or history… Well, that was another.  Once I was a celebrity they didn’t want to be on my blacklist.”  _Learning how to use power, Castle?_   Maybe with the best of intentions – protecting his family – but that’s a slippery slope, and it looks like he slipped.

“We were together nearly three years.  It took her mother that long to persuade her I wasn’t worth it.  I think.  Maybe it was beginning to come to an end anyway.  I don’t know.  I didn’t think so.  I last saw her at Grand Central on her way to JFK.  She went to Europe: said she needed space.  She didn’t want me to come with her.  I never heard from her again.”  Beckett flashes back to a night in her apartment when she’d lied to herself for the umpteenth time and asked him to go – and said that she wanted some space.  Oh.  Oh God.  Nothing like inadvertently hitting the open wounds.  No wonder it had all blown up. 

“The rest was history.  I finished my first novel just after the last year at college” – after Kyra left, Beckett calculates – “and after several rejections Black Pawn accepted it.  It was a massive success.  I had fame, money and friends.  Everyone loved me.  Everyone wanted to give me anything I wanted, no-one ever said no.  But I never wanted anyone to do anything they didn’t want to.  Not ever.”  His mood has moved again.

“I fell into the party lifestyle.  I did a lot of stupid things.  I thought people were friends.  Sure they were, just as long as I signed the check.  I was getting bored of it when I met Meredith.”  He stops.  Beckett thinks he’s just jumped over something really, really important.  His arm loosens, drops away.  Hers doesn’t.

“Then Alexis arrived.  She changed everything.  I didn’t need anything but my family.  She needed me” – there’s another jump – “and I didn’t care about anything else except her and writing.”  Beckett doesn’t fail to notice the absence of Meredith in that sentence.  “My mother was touring, relatively successfully, and anyway I could make sure she could do it comfortably.  She’d never need to be hungry, or stay in flea-ridden board-houses, ever again.  I could save her that.  She’d met a man” – his tone changes, becomes sharper – “and she was madly in love.  She called one day to say she’d gotten married.  I couldn’t leave Alexis.”  There’s another jump again.  This is like following a hyperactive frog, the amount of jumping that’s going on.

“Everything was fine.  Alexis and I managed okay, Mother wrote, or called, every so often.  Quite a lot, really: every week.  She adored Alexis’s babbling down a phone.  Then one week she didn’t call.  I was worried.  She turned up on the doorstep of my loft” – Beckett quirks an eyebrow – “Yes, the same loft.”  There’s a Castle-standard cocky grin.  “I’d made a _lot_ of money by then, and contrary to my PR I kept most of it: I never wanted to be poor again – the next week, distraught.  He’d cleaned out her account and taken off.” 

He’s abruptly much cheerier, though his grin has sharp teeth.  Seems like he’s jumped over all the bad bits and got to a place he likes a lot better.  “Mother moved in with us.  It made things easier, having two adults around.  Her career took off – I could help.”  He grins very nastily.  “And I tracked down her ex.  We had a little chat.  I enjoyed it very much.  He didn’t.  And that’s how we got to be the three of us.”  Beckett suspects that the _little chat_ is something she shouldn’t enquire into.  At least, statute of limitations notwithstanding, unless she wants an excuse to arrest Castle.  She doesn’t want _him_ in handcuffs.  That wouldn’t be any fun.  His confidence seems to be restored, for now.  It also seems like he’s just noticed that she’s in his lap.  His arms rise around her.  Other things also appear to have risen.

“Enough story, Beckett.”  Now that’s a tone she hasn’t heard since – oh.  Since… since she’d decided to go all in and then he’d said _It’s about your mother_ and it had all collapsed around her – them.  It wraps around her just like his arms are doing.  For now, it’s right.  Not wholly right, and certainly not wholly explained.  It still hasn’t explained the PR persona properly at all.  It doesn’t fit with the man who’d protected his family, any and every way he could.  She strongly suspects that Meredith has a lot to do with that change, but she can’t see how.  But here and now, it’ll do.  More than do: he’s told her a lot.  The rest can wait till he’s ready.  She looks up into his eyes, entirely unsurprised to find them darkened.

Castle’s had enough of conversation.  Well.  Monologue.  Tonight’s story is done.  Telling it, he slowly understands, hasn’t been nearly as bad as he’d expected.  Possibly because he skipped over anything to do with his unsatisfactory marriages.  Talking about Kyra was quite sufficient.  Still, he feels better.  She’s heard a lot of the story, and she hasn’t walked away.  He doesn’t feel like he did last night, drained and miserable: he feels – relieved.  Lighter.  Somewhat.  He doesn’t want to think any more.  He’s had enough thinking in these last few days.  Time for a little less conversation, a little more action.  Beckett’s looking at him and her eyes are huge and dark.  He leans over and kisses her hard.

It’s explosive.


	76. It's my party (and I'll cry if I want to)

Over a week of separation hasn’t so much fuelled the fire as dropped the neutron activator into a heap of weapons-grade plutonium, setting off an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction.  It’s instant, inflammable, incendiary: the _can’t get enough of you_ desperation that rips clothes and leaves marks and doesn’t even _think_ about making it to the bed.  His hands are everywhere, hard and forceful as he strips her t-shirt, her shorts: his mouth barely softer.  Beckett’s no better: his shirt a minor inconvenience to her; (it won’t be any inconvenience ever again, without some serious repair) his hair a convenient hold to drag his head to where she wants it.

Neither of them are prepared to slow down and explore their feelings.  This is simply, _only_ , about being together in a way that neither can mistake or misinterpret or minimise: mutual possession; complete ownership.  There’s nothing soft, or loving, here, only the physical claim on each other; no teasing, no foreplay, just hard grip and hot mouths and then they’re both naked and he’s inside her and there’s no more thinking or talking or anything but harder, deeper, _more, now_ and it’s over as fast as they began and Castle’s still gripping her hard enough that it doesn’t feel like he’s ever going to let go.  When he stands, hauls her up with him and pushes her to the nearest bedroom she’s sure of it.  Neither of them has said a word.  Plenty noise, but not a single word.

Castle shoves Beckett on to the bed and falls over her before she has a chance to recover from the impact, pinning her down and kissing her in a way that admits no argument.  Beckett gives in without a struggle and Castle takes instant advantage, devouring her mouth and then sweeping downwards, nipping and sucking and proving to her with every touch that she’s wholly _his_ and nothing is going to be allowed to come between them.  He doesn’t give her the slightest opportunity to divert him from his purpose.  She’ll have her turn later.  This is all about merging her into him so deeply that she never wants to come out.  He strokes hard fingers through her and shortly she’s a writhing, moaning mess under his hands and mouth and then he spreads her and takes her again and she’s screaming his name into his mouth and shatters around him and throws him over with it.

And then she’s in his arms, pulled across his chest, possessed and protected and it’s almost, almost all right as she falls asleep.

* * *

 

A few days pass. 

They talk about current affairs, or cop work, or culture; walk in the woods, or to the lake, and fail to catch a single fish, for which Castle, at least, is grateful.  Nature red in tooth and claw is not his thing.  They explore the interests they share, the things they disagree on: try, and more than start, to find friendship, as well as lust.  They spend their nights in the same bed, variously heated and frantic or slow and gentle or exploring the dark waters where they’re both so very comfortable.  But all the time the elephant stands in the middle of the room.  Castle hasn’t mentioned the last piece of his past: his marriages.  Or indeed anything much else about his life after losing Kyra and prior to Beckett hauling him out his book party.  Beckett hasn’t, he notices, said anything more about her first disastrous relationship.

He knows he needs to finish the story, tell her the rest.  It’s sitting like the devil on his shoulder, chewing at his brain, leaving him discomforted and stinging with the knowledge that they aren’t yet on a par, that Beckett’s at a disadvantage still and he’s not playing fair.  But every time he looks at what he needs to say he backs away, like a coward.

Beckett is perfectly well aware of Castle’s underlying unhappiness and discomfort, and does what she can to reassure him: mainly with physical contact: taking his hand, curling up to him, simply being there.  Not speaking is hardly a difficulty for her: she’s never liked meaningless chatter.  Except when it’s Castle’s theories and burblings in the precinct or elsewhere, which aren’t, generally, meaningless – way out, perhaps, but they spark her thinking and together it becomes a solution.  Anyway, she has a lot of thinking that she wants to do, around Castle’s pile of already-revealed secrets.  There’s a lot of evidence to be sorted there, to solve his mystery.  _Ugh_ , she thinks, _Castle’s overblown phrasing is rubbing off on me_.  But it’s still necessary to understand him, the way he understands her.  She doesn’t want to mess this up.  And so she sits on a sunny afternoon on her bench seat on the porch, curled into him, and loses herself in thought, nibbling her lip as if she were at her murder board, frowning occasionally. 

Fortunately, all that Castle can see is the top of her head and her lithe body snuggled into him, just where it ought to be and certainly not trying to shuffle away.  He has a lot of thinking of his own to do.

Beckett has drawn several conclusions about Castle’s earlier life and real personality already. Severe personal insecurity – no stability except his mother, which had been badly rocked when she sent him, for the best of motives, to a boarding school; a poverty-blighted early life; bullying – had left him with a desperate need to be liked, and a considerable ability to act any part which made that happen.

That same poverty, and the appalling result of trying to save some abused ingénue, plus his mother’s unfortunate choice of husband and then being a single parent, had left him with an ingrained desire to rescue people – like he’d tried to rescue her from the unhealed pain of her mother’s unsolved case – make it all better for them, successfully.  He’s _very_ protective, privately.  It belatedly occurs to Beckett that Castle watching her do her job must practically give him hives.  If he really does love her, then it’s obvious why he needs to follow her around – to make sure that he’s there every time she takes a risk.  He won’t stop her, but he needs to have her back, be her partner.  Far too belatedly, she realises that this is part of why he wouldn’t leave, no matter how she hurt him.  She feels a hornet-sting of guilt, and cuddles in a little closer on the bench seat.

And then there’s the other side of that insecurity, the fear of failing.  Beckett had, personally, only experienced the pressure she’d put on herself to get through the Stuyvesant entrance test.  Her parents had told her to go for it, but if she did her best and didn’t make it then she had plenty of other options, including some of the best private schools.  Some of her friends hadn’t been so lucky in their parents.  They’d been handed tutors, and study schedules, and been told over and over, overtly or covertly, that this was their only route to success: that failure would ruin them.  When only one in thirty-five gets in, that’s a hell of a lot of pressure.  And all those kids had really had other options.  Socially acceptable options, as Castle might have said.  Castle had no other options, and he knew how much rode on him getting scholarships.  He couldn’t get away from the pressure, or his mother’s hopes.  She’d been right to try to lessen their intense relationship, just wholly wrong in how she did it.  So he learned that failing is a disaster, and he absolutely has to avoid ever failing. 

Then he’d failed to save that abused ingénue, watched his hero-worship fall apart, failed to save his mother, and failed in love with this Kyra.  It all bleeds together in a toxic cocktail of insecurity, doesn’t it? 

But hating failing has deeper implications.  If you have to apologise, then you’ve failed.  And the first time she’d thought that there might be anything faintly likeable, or real, about Castle was when he’d apologised for screwing up with the nanny case.  She’d thought then that he disliked doing it – but he’d meant it.  And whenever he’d been in the wrong (and he’d been far less in the wrong than he’d thought) he’d apologised.  Which for someone who really hates failure, takes some serious strength of character.  Far too easy to pretend you haven’t failed, ignore it and pass on.  He never had.

The only thing that he’d had confidence in was his writing – or at least, no more insecurity than any other writer: publication date must be much like getting exam results.  When she’d pulled him out his party – he’d been blocked.  And she’d unblocked him.  So… to _not_ fail at writing, the only thing to do was stick with her.  Hmmm.  Instant heat on his part, then instant unblocking, and then she didn’t _like_ him at all.  He had to be liked, he had to write successfully, and he was never going to be pushed away ever again.  She couldn’t have been more of a challenge if she’d designed it deliberately.  Except that somewhere it had stopped being a challenge and started being something so much more, and she’d totally failed to realise it.

Then there’s his focus on family.  Beckett thinks that Alexis might be the only thing that had connected a twenty-five/twenty-six year old Castle to reality.  He adores her, and clearly had since the first moment he saw her.  _She changed everything_ , he’d said.  He’d stopped his playboy lifestyle – but then he’d started it again.  Or – had he?  Really?  Beckett pounces on that thought like a tiger on a staked goat.  He’d certainly made it _look_ like he had.   She’s sure there’d been some fire, behind all that smoke.  He’s far too good in bed not to have had a reasonable amount of practice.  Plenty page six, plenty pretty women, plenty signing chests – all in glorious PR Technicolor.  Just like the date he’d been auctioned for.  And he’s an actor.  Ah.  That so-called date had been a complete fake.  It’s not implausible that plenty of the others – though not all – hadn’t been.  _After_ Alexis.  Early twenties, fame and fortune – that adds up to a lot of good times, before his daughter.  And Beckett’s pretty good in bed herself, but she’s not had a lot of practice for a very long time.  Some things you don’t forget. 

Enough thinking.  She wriggles her shoulders in the sunshine and stops thinking about Castle’s past.  The only missing piece now is between his first success and four months ago.  She won’t push.  She mustn’t push.  But she really wants this all resolved and in the open.  She wants to tell him everything she feels, but she’s scared to admit it if she doesn’t fully understand what’s made him the man he was, and what has changed since to make him the man he now is.

It never crosses her mind that he might have changed under the example of the precinct, and her team.

* * *

 

The sun eventually starts to dwindle away, the air is cooler over Beckett’s shoulders, and her tank top really isn’t quite enough to keep her warm.  And the mosquitoes are unlikely to take a hint and go away.  Time for dinner.  She doesn’t admit to herself that she’s really hoping that Castle will alleviate the awkwardness that’s been hiding behind each moment of each day by finishing the story.  He’s only talked in detail in the evenings, when the gloom and later darkness hides him.

Tonight’s dinner contains none of the casual, getting-to-know-you chat that has figured over the last few days.  Silly, Beckett thinks, that it’s taken them this long to really get down to getting to know each other, but they hadn’t really got past talking about each other’s day after the kidnap case and before it all fell apart: discussing the precinct or cases or cops or Castle’s writing – but not other matters, the small things that make up a more rounded relationship.  She misses the chat, the quickfire exchange of ideas and banter, but the only reason for Castle to have retreated into himself is because he’s organising his thoughts to tell the last piece of the story.

She’s right.  Castle is trying to come up with a way to explain the last thirteen or so years without looking like either a blind idiot or a selfish jackass.  Or indeed both. 

It’s been okay so far, he thinks.  At least, Beckett hadn’t run screaming or thrown him out.  Yet.  In fact, anything but.  She’s cuddled in close, rarely out of contact, showing him in every touch how wrong she’d been, before.  Contrarily, he’d rather she sat across the table and interrogated him, hands flat on the wood and glaring at him with that ferocious fury that she’d employed the first time she met him and with endless suspects ever since.  It would be so much easier just to tell her everything if she’d only force it out of him.  Except she’s firmly restraining herself: affording him the courtesy of space and time, the courtesy that she’d wanted and he hadn’t afforded her.  He winces, internally.  She’s letting him explain in his own time and his own way.

If it wasn’t for the banked-up strain of holding off that intense desire to know, which he can see building behind her eyes, he’d think she didn’t care about his explanation.  But she does, she _does_ , and she’s been thinking, drawing conclusions from the evidence to date, all afternoon.  If he doesn’t talk soon, she’ll infer – probably correctly, she’s such a good detective – everything.  He’d rather tell her.  Absolution, perhaps.  Or penance, for his manifold sins.  She’s confessed hers.  They only have a few days left.  Time is running out on him, running out on them.

Time, then, to talk.

“Beckett?”

“Mmm?”  She’s staring at the table, or out the window, or just into space.  More of that dangerous pastime, thinking.

“D’you want a coffee?  I’m decaffeinated.”  Beckett recognises the theft of her own phrase and smirks nastily.

“Can’t you think up your own catchphrases, Castle?”

“Why bother when someone else uses them in my hearing?”

“I want royalties.  Every time you use it.  And if it shows up in one of your books I’ll claim copyright.”

“You can’t copyright a single word.  But I’ll pay royalties.”  She looks momentarily horrified as he calls her bluff.

“I don’t want…”

“One kiss.  Every time.”  She rolls her eyes at him and he grins back until she reluctantly grins too. 

“I don’t know, Castle.  I might prefer coffee.”  He growls.  “Which you promised me a minute ago, but I don’t see any coffee.”  She notes the delaying tactic but plays along.  Anything to be normal for one more moment.

Coffee occurs.  Sitting on the couch occurs.  Holding hands and curling into Castle occurs.  Castle talking does not occur.

Beckett is, unusually, completely at a loss for what to do.  She has the clear impression that Castle, as with a certain type of witness, wants to be forced to speak through questioning, but although she could so easily do that: make it happen, wrench every word and thought and feeling out his head – he wouldn’t even try to resist – it feels all wrong.  She thinks, on no grounds except her instincts, that he has to do it for himself.  But they’re beginning to run out of time.  She’s chasing that thought around her brain when Castle finally begins.  This time, it’s not a story.

“I said my first book was a success.  It… all went to my head.  I could do anything.  I had the legalities locked down cold, and I made damn sure I kept hold of my finances – but I had more money than I’d ever imagined, and even after I’d looked after Mother and made sure I couldn’t blow through it all I had a lot to spend.  Everyone loved me.  I was leader of the pack and whatever I wanted to do, my friends” – his mouth twists, and Beckett wonders how long it took him to realise they weren’t real friends – “were very happy to do.  Just so long as I kept signing the check.  There was booze, first beer, then spirits.  Lots of sex.  When booze wasn’t enough, we tried other things.  It was one long party.”  He’s clearly expecting Beckett to show disgust. 

“I did some pretty stupid stuff at Stanford, too.  No powders, but I inhaled.”  Once.  She’d hated the feeling of being out of control.  But that’s not the point right now.

“You?  _You_ tried pot?”  Castle’s shocked right out of his undoubtedly cashmere mix socks.  “You tried _pot_ , Beckett?  What _else_ haven’t you told me about what you did at college?”

“So many things, Castle.  So many things,” she says smoothly.  He smiles ferally. 

“We’ll explore that, another time.”  His hand slides over hers – and then he suddenly remembers what he has to do, and his hand and smile both drop away.

“But Black Pawn wanted another book.  I found I couldn’t write – I couldn’t write _anything_ good.  Writing was more important to me than the parties, or the people.  So I went to rehab, very quietly and privately, and I beat it.  But I couldn’t convince others to come too.  After.  When I was clean and they weren’t.  I couldn’t save them, either.  Couldn’t save anyone that had been down there in the mud with me.  I… They told me that only you can change you.  That the others didn’t want to.  I tried, though.  I would have paid for their rehab.  It wasn’t like I couldn’t afford it.  But I couldn’t save them.  Anyone.”  His pronouns have lost all precision, in his unhappiness.

“You saved me.”  This time he hears her.

“You didn’t need me.  That trafficker – you’d have handled that by yourself if I’d not been there.”  Beckett shakes her head.

“No.  You saved me then.  But not just then.  Earlier.  Just after my mother died.”  There’s an unsteady breath.  “All your books… Mom had them.  With them, I felt closer to her.  I read them over and over.  Every one of them, they solved the case, got the bad guy.”  She pauses.  “So that’s what I decided I was going to do.  Get the bad guy.  Solve the case.”  She pauses again.  “I poured the vodka down the sink, before I followed my dad right into the bottle.”  Castle’s arm comes round her.  “So you did save someone.”  Her tone sharpens to command.  “So stop saying you didn’t, or couldn’t.  You could and you did and you have.”

There’s a stricken pause.  It’s absolutely not what Beckett expected.  She’d expected relief, or comfort.

“You became a cop because of my books?  You thought you could solve your mother’s murder because of _my_ books?”  His voice rips through her, saw-toothed agony.  “I didn’t save you, Beckett.  I pushed you down the rabbit hole the first time and ten days ago I did it again.”

 _Oh fuck no_.  He can’t think that.  It’s _not_ _true_.  She’d better not mention the sleeping pills the counsellor had suggested.  They’d gone down the sink too, unused.  She doesn’t think she’d have used them... stupidly.  But better not to have them at all.  She hadn’t bought a sleeping pill since, till last week.  Just in case.

“ _No._ ”  He’s never heard that tone from her before, not even when she’s interrogating the worst lowlife.  There is no possibility of disagreement with her words here, there, or the other side of the grave.  That tone would raise the dead to do her bidding.  God Himself would stop and stand to attention at that tone.

“ _You did not_.  I went to grief counselling, after that night.  It helped: I was fine.  I was okay.  Right up till I looked at the case file, once I became a Homicide Detective and knew what I was looking at.  Before then... sure I’d looked at it as a uniform, every minute, but I thought I simply didn’t understand.  But after... I looked at it again, and I knew.  It was lazy cop work, Castle.   That’s what sent me down the rabbit hole.  Not you. More therapy…”  She curls into his chest, not looking at him.  This was supposed to be his story, and instead things she’d long forgotten are being dragged up too.  But he _will not_ think that any of that was his fault.  He’d _saved_ her.

“This is your story, Castle.  Carry on.”


	77. You can cheat him

Castle is so shocked by what Beckett has just said that his carefully organised thinking has flown out his head.  He’d been right, when he’d wondered if her comments, weeks ago, about lazy policing had been personal.  He wakes out of his stupor when she elbows him, not particularly gently.

“Carry on, Castle.”  Oh.  Must he?  There’s a pause, while he re-establishes his thoughts.

“I stayed clean.  Honestly?  I was getting bored of it all.  I kept writing, Black Pawn kept publishing, and each book was a bigger success than the last.  But I was getting tired of the parties and tired of the people I thought were my friends.  And then I met her.”  Ah-ha, thinks Beckett, Meredith.  She makes sure she’s in close physical contact.  Castle might be able to hide changes in the tone of his voice, and the gathering twilight will hide subtle changes in his expression or the look in his eye, but he’s not going to be able to hide the reactions in his body.

“Meredith.  She was irresistible.  Now, I can see why.  Then, I saw a struggling red-headed wannabe actress who looked tired, hungry and somewhat ill.”  _Ain’t programming a wonderful thing,_ thinks Beckett.  She can see exactly why Castle took up with her: she doesn’t even have to hear the next bit.  Though – why marry her?

 “I could take care of her, in a way I couldn’t have taken care of my mother, before.  I was in love with her, and she with me.  So she said.  She was as possessive as she could be, wanted me all to herself.  I’d never have cheated on her, but she still raged if I got close to another woman.  She didn’t seem to realise that I didn’t want to go near anyone else.”  That carries a cargo ship’s load of acid pain.  Beckett can feel the harsh tension in his arm, and remembers the way in which he’d said _I don’t cheat.  At anything_.  “It was everything I wanted.  When she told me – because I guessed - she was pregnant I couldn’t have been happier.  I was going to have a family of my own.  I’d never walk away from my family; not like my father.”  _No, you didn’t, did you?_   Castle would never have walked away from responsibility.

“So I married her straight away.  I wanted to do it right.  Meredith… Meredith wasn’t interested in the baby.  Meredith hated being pregnant, hated thinking about it.  I made all the decisions, got everything ready – she couldn’t have cared less.  She didn’t even care what the name would be.  But I thought it would all be better after the baby came.  Some women just don’t enjoy pregnancy…”  Beckett wouldn’t know.  It’s not a subject she’s thought about.  Personally or for any of her close friends. (All one of them.  Lanie’s not exactly worrying about the biological clock either.)

“…but once the baby arrives they love it.  Except she didn’t.  She just didn’t care, wasn’t even depressed.  She wouldn’t feed Alexis, barely changed a diaper, cuddled her once in a way, if I asked her to.  I didn’t notice.  I fell in love with Alexis the moment the hospital let me see her, and I did everything – wanted to do everything.  She was so small and helpless and beautiful.  There wasn’t room for anything else except my family.  I didn’t go out – didn’t want to.  Once the initial exhaustion was over – do you know how hard a small baby is?  Sleep deprivation is a recognised form of torture and it’s twenty-four/seven for the first three months – I could write and look after her, and my writing got better and better.  I thought everything would be fine.  But I think even then I knew that it wasn’t.  It didn’t matter what I did, Meredith wasn’t happy.  Maybe she was a bit jealous of Alexis.  I don’t know.  I told myself she still loved me – told myself I still loved her – and gave both of them everything I could.” 

He stops.  The next bit… well.  He has to say this somehow.  He’s never told anyone all of this story.  He clutches his hands together.  Stark tension spikes from him.

“I had to go to a publishing meeting: cover pictures, PR schedule, that sort of thing.  So Meredith had to stay home.  She wasn’t happy, but it couldn’t be helped.  Alexis was a good baby but I’d never have concentrated on anything else with her in the room with me.  I was going to be out all afternoon: I told her I’d be back a little after five.  Alexis normally had a nap between two and four – she was still so very small.”  His face softens for a moment, and the tension subsides.  “She was so cute when she was asleep.  I used to sneak in and watch her.”  The strain returns.

“We – amazingly – finished up in short order.  For once everything was the way I wanted it, first time.  It’s never happened again.”  He digresses, delaying the moment of truth.  “Cover artists never seem to read the book.  They put on designs with the wrong people – blonde instead of brunette; that sort of idiocy.  That’s why the Heat cover is a silhouette.  Usually it takes hours to sort it out, and then Gina and Paula usually wanted me to do weeks of tours and signings every evening for a month.  I stopped that, as soon as Alexis arrived, but there were often a lot of arguments about it.  But for once it was a really short meeting.  I was done by half-past two.  So I went home straight away, thinking that it would cheer Meredith up.  I got us cupcakes on the way…I thought she’d like that.”  He remembers them, cheerfully iced and patterned.  He feels Beckett take his twisting hands in hers.

“I slipped the door open as quietly as I could, so as not to wake Alexis.  I was going to go check on her.  I heard voices.  Meredith laughing.  I knew, straight away, what it was.”  His face contorts.  “She only ever laughed that way in bed.”  He stops.  Beckett doesn’t say anything, but she clasps her hands more tightly around his, trying to give comfort.  This would have been bad enough, but it’s clear he hasn’t finished.  His jaw is very tight.  “So I closed the door very quietly and put the cupcakes down on the counter.”  Another pause.  “I can still hear her saying it now, sometimes.”  Beckett can’t see his expression, in the dark.  She doesn’t need to.  She can hear every delineation of his pain in his voice, feel every bite of agony in his posture.  She holds him close, but she’s sure he’s noticing nothing outside his wrenching memories.

“She was with a film director, in our bed, in our bedroom.  He must have asked her about how she got here, or maybe whether she’d leave.  And she said…she said… she said she’d put all that effort into acting a part that was sure to reel me in, and why would she give this up right now when all she had to do was let me be Mr Mom and enjoy the sex and the money?”  _What the hell?_   Beckett barely has time to understand what he’s just said when all the angry, bitter, painful words flood over her.  “She’d played me.  Learned my history and worked out from it what would likely trigger all my better instincts and played to it.  It was all just a lie, just an act.  She’d never really cared at all.  Wanted the money and the lifestyle and the kudos of catching rich celebrity Rick Castle.  She liked the sex and the money and didn’t care at all about anything else.  But getting pregnant hadn’t been in her game plan.  I sometimes wonder, if I hadn’t noticed – if I hadn’t worked mostly at home – what she might have done.”  He stops.  Harsh, rasping breathing scours the air.

“I walked in.  The director was embarrassed.  Meredith – wasn’t.  And when I said I’d heard everything and suggested she dressed and left – permanently - she just shrugged and said she’d been planning to leave eventually anyway, this just speeded it up.  I was no fun anymore because I spent all my time on Alexis and not her.  It had all been a game to her.  She really didn’t understand why I was so upset.  I had her possessions boxed and sent after her.   I couldn’t bear to touch them.  I couldn’t even collapse, because Alexis needed me.”  He’s struggling for any control of his emotions.  Thirteen years of never talking about it, never thinking of it, repressing the whole disaster, is breaking the dams of his self-control.

“If she hadn’t been Alexis’s mother… I’d have made sure she couldn’t even get a job cleaning restrooms within a hundred miles of New York.  I wanted to.”  His voice is cold and hard, all the misery rammed down.  “I _really_ wanted to.  But eventually Alexis would have asked about her mother.  I had to be better than that, for Alexis.  And she was _my_ daughter.”  There’s a ghastly, guilty silence.  “I checked.  DNA test, sent off that same week.  She doesn’t know.  She’s never going to know, because I’m never, ever going to tell her.  But if she hadn’t been my biological daughter I would have had to adopt her legally.  She was _my daughter_.” 

Beckett hears the note of possession – no, not possession, of absolute, unconditional love – in his voice and understands that whether Castle had known it or not, that for him her saying she was his was much more than just a bedroom game.  Had never been a bedroom game. No sort of a game at all.

“I could never have given her up. She meant everything to me, and I had to be the best parent – dad and mom both – for her.  She kept me whole, and sane, because I’d never, ever be able to do anything that would damage her.”  He gulps in old, sour pain with each inhalation of air.  “For Alexis, I even settled some money on Meredith, because one day she’d ask about her mother, and I wouldn’t disappoint her then.  Not that Meredith was grateful.  She moved to L.A.  We stayed in Manhattan.”

Suddenly he tugs his hands out of Beckett’s and pushes her away to stand up and disappear through the door.  She hears the outside door open and shut, and knows he’s out on the porch, under the stars.  She’s left sitting alone in the dark room, appalled, angry on his behalf, angry with herself that she’s made him drag this up.  Fitting Meredith with concrete overshoes and taking her a mile or so offshore to see if she can swim seems quite a nice option.  How anyone can behave like that Beckett does not know.

But _oh_ , she sees him now.  All laid out like a solved case.  Of _course_ he’d gone back to being a hard-shelled playboy: smug and unpleasant and arrogant and flirting meaninglessly with anyone who caught his eye.  He’d tried to be real – he’d been real, in the blinding love for his baby – and been betrayed for it, in the most fundamental way imaginable.  Why be real, why give yourself, if it’s all thrown back in your face?  So back to what worked.  _Being whoever he needed to be to be liked._   The only place he could be liked – loved – for being real was behind his own front door.  Thirteen years of not being real gives you a pretty thick coating.  Thirteen years of everyone loving someone who you aren’t, and giving the not-you anything he wants, teaches you that you need not to be you.  In fact, you need to be someone else. 

So that’s what he became.

Someone else, someone who everyone had loved before Alexis came and changed his world, someone who everyone still loved.  Rick Castle, party animal, modern Casanova, and all round good-time guy: hot, rich, talented and insanely successful.  What’s not to like?  Except it isn’t who he is.

She waits for a couple of moments, just long enough for it to be clear that Castle isn’t coming back inside any time soon, and then follows him out.  She finds him leaning on the porch rail, head hanging low between his hunched shoulders, like a wounded bison, with that same feeling of massive, looming pain.  She says nothing; simply comes up behind him, silent on bare feet, and wraps arms around his waist, leans against his broad back.  She can feel the shudder in his chest, hear the shake in his breath.  They stand so for some time, nothing changing.

“Come inside, Castle,” Beckett says, almost pleading.  “Come inside to bed.”  Come to where she can hold him close, reassure him, soothe this pain.  But he only shakes his head.

“I won’t sleep.  I can’t sleep.”  It sounds like rejection.  She pushes that thought away.  That’s only her insecurities talking.  She knows he’s a night bird.

“Okay, no sleeping.  Stay here, or come inside?”

“Here.”

Beckett lets go, ignoring the unhappy noise this causes, and rummages in the kitchen to find two citronella candles and the matches.  She takes it all back outside, places and lights the candles for maximum mosquito repelling effect and minimum chance of fire, and returns to wrapping herself around Castle, who doesn’t seem to have moved an inch.

When Beckett lets go of him and goes inside Castle’s agony spikes through him.  She’s heard his tale and now she’s rejecting him too.  He slumps on the rail and looks down into the dark, so lost in his own miserable imaginings that he doesn’t notice the light and scent of the candles.  He does, however, notice Beckett’s arms back around him, and he slowly realises that she isn’t leaving him.

“Turn around, Castle.”  He doesn’t.

“ _Turn around._ ”  This time it’s the same direct-to-spinal-cord tone that she’d used earlier.  Castle  is not proof against it, even buried as deeply as he is in the depths of his memories.  He straightens up and turns around.  Quickly.  As soon as he does Beckett takes hold of both his ears – _ow_ – and drags his head down to hers so she can kiss him hard.  She doesn’t stop invading his mouth till he starts to respond.  Then she pulls away.  _No_.  He is not having that.  He pulls her right back to him and kisses her till she squirms, only then letting up.

“That’s better,” Beckett says crisply, from her position against him.  “Now that it’s clear I’m not going anywhere, do you want to leave it for tonight or carry on talking till you’re done?”

Castle is looking totally confused, and, despite his response to being kissed, still miserable.  Beckett sighs.  Why does talking always lead to trouble?  At least this time it’s – probably – not trouble between them. 

“Castle.  Listen to me.  It doesn’t matter what you tell me: that doesn’t – won’t – make a difference to what I” – there’s a hitch in her words – “feel.  But if you don’t tell me then it’ll come back to bite us – just like me not talking to you did.”  He still looks uncomprehending.  “I’m not running.”  Still blank.  Beckett gives up on words, which have been nearly as successful as words have always been for her – that is to say not at all - yanks his head back down and goes back to kissing him with all the force that she can bring to bear.  Maybe that will break through his barriers, and show him she’s in this for real.

It certainly gets his attention.  She should have predicted that if she tried to take charge it would trigger all of his reflexes.  Half a microsecond after she’s landed her lips on his and invaded again he’s turning the tables on her with one hand firmly in her hair to hold her head where he’d like it and the other firmly on her ass to hold _that_ where he’d like it.  Which is so tightly against his body that she could tell whether there’s a pattern on his boxers without needing to look.  And this time, he’s not stopping.

He flips them round and cages her against the rail, forcing her backward and pushing her feet apart so that he can grind in and make her writhe and whimper for him, desperate to hear her acknowledge her – _his_ \- need, desperate to remind himself, again, that _this_ woman doesn’t fake attraction (but denies it to the point of insanity), doesn’t lie about loving him (she’s not yet admitted it, but he’s pretty sure), isn’t just with him for the fame and the fortune and the fucking.  There is far more to this than that.  There’s so much more to Beckett than that.  He’s hard and rough and forceful and it’s just as well that this is how she likes it and that she’s clearly into this because all the dragged-up anger and emotion has concentrated itself into one idea: Beckett.  Very specifically, _his_ Beckett, in _his_ bed, right now and then for the rest of _their_ lives. 

Beckett readily recognises Castle’s burning need to take and keep total control of this evening, in order to soften (never erase) the memories of his inability to have any control over the events of his disastrous first marriage.  But what he needs does not include her complete surrender without a fight.  He needs to _take,_ not simply be given; needs to reassert some semblance of his normal self.  He needs eased; made to forget his demons.  Just like he’s done for her, oftentimes.  Time – past time – to return those favours: to give him what he’s so often given to her, unspoken, unasked and – _ouch_ – unthanked.  Talking is done for the night.  Well, apart from a very few, very precise words.  Such as _more_ , and _yes_ and _please_.  Probably – certainly, with Castle in this mood – _yours_. 

He pulls her off the rail and walks her inside and to his (it’s rapidly become _his_ ) bedroom, catches her wrists and holds them behind her to stop her being able to touch him; invades her mouth roughly and then uses everything he knows about her to make her submit: nipping at the nerve below her ear, trapping her against him, using his free hand to roam over her and touch her anywhere but where she’d like best.  She keeps fighting him, though, trying to break his hold, trying to dominate his mouth, trying to take him; till he has to hold her so tightly that surely the delicate skin of her wrists will bruise, surely there will be finger marks on her back.  He forces her across to the bed, using size and strength to push her down: she’s still fighting for dominance and he is _not having it_ because she’s _his_ and he knows what she needs, what she likes and he _will_ fight her to the standstill she obviously wants.  He begins to stroke her and strip her, preventing her retaliating.  He shoves her flat on her back and holds her hands firmly above her head and uses a heavy thigh to pin her down and removes her t-shirt and unbuttons her shorts and _oh_ he can see how wet she already is but that’s not enough for him.

She keeps fighting back.  She wrenches her hands away from his, flicks open three buttons on his shirt before he’s worked out what she’s doing. (fast hands and rhythm, she thinks, just like a rowing eight)  She fights back against his searching tongue, as well, forcing her own desire on him, leaves his buttons for a second and slips down to palm across him and open his pants and he whips her hands away and back above her head and plunders her mouth until she accepts his conquest.

“Stop fighting, Beckett.”

“Make me,” she taunts.

That’s not a challenge he’s going to refuse.  He needs her, and he knows it.  But on his terms, not the ones she’s trying to impose.  He pulls her shorts off with her panties and strips himself one-handed, pushes his leg between hers to feel the heat and moisture and watch her writhe against the friction and swoops to take her mouth hard and spreads her open without any gentleness at all and thrusts once to be wholly inside her.

“ _Mine_.  All mine.  You’re never running away again.”  If Beckett had thought he had been possessive previously, if she’d heard this tone then she’d have run for the hills.  But then, _then_ she didn’t know what it meant, either.  Though she would still have run, even two weeks ago.  This tone is the same as he’d used an hour or more ago when he’d said _my daughter_.  This tone doesn’t mean possession.  This tone means _I love you beyond reason_.  This tone says that the only way Castle will ever leave is feet first in a box.

Looks like she’s got a permanent partner, in far more ways than one.


	78. Face it all together

“Not running,” she gasps out.  Vocal control is not the first thing on her mind.  Castle moves slightly against her and she breathes harder and opens further under him and then there is definitely no more talking at all for some time except for the very limited vocabulary of blazing desire.

She would have curled in, but she never gets the slightest chance.  Castle has her pulled across him before she’s even opened her eyes again and is, once more, clinging to her as if she’s his comfort blanket.

“Don’t run from me,” he says, eventually.  “Don’t ever just run away.”  There’s a painful pause.  “If you want to leave” – Beckett starts – “you have to tell me it’s over.  Tell me the truth.”  Beckett has not the slightest difficulty in unpicking the psychology of those statements. 

“I’m not running,” she says again, and wraps her own arms more tightly round him.  “But sometimes I need a little room.  I’ll” – she recognises the truth that she needs to tell, again – “try to tell you, first.  But likely it won’t always work.  I don’t always see it coming.”

Castle, soothed by her first statement, can manage to pull the key fact from the second.  He thinks, though, that the reason she hasn’t seen it coming is that until he showed up she was so close to burnout that the slightest thing started to set her off-balance.  He’d seen how near she was, during the eco-terrorist case, the kidnap case, and he’d been able – at least the second time of those – to avert it.  Another good reason to stay close, and a better one to keep going after her.  Her words – _I’m not running_ – settle in around his heart and warm it.

“I can’t always deal with emotions.  I need to put them away and carry on.”  Hmm.  “Every time I knock on someone’s door I’m destroying their life.  I can’t carry their emotions – I mustn’t, to be able to do the job.  It spills over.”  Ah-ha.  Even if it hadn’t been for her disastrous earlier love life, she’d have walled herself off.  And that’s why she hadn’t wanted to get close to his family.  If she’d had to tell them bad news – and she would have done it herself, if at all possible, because she’d never have shirked her duty no matter how painful – she wouldn’t want a connection.

“I’ll try to give you room,” he replies.   “But if I forget, or push too hard, you have to _tell_ me.  I can’t read your mind.”  He smirks, suddenly, pulls her up to look her in the eye.  “I’m just a man, Beckett.  We can’t understand women.”

Beckett smirks in return.  “Yeah, I noticed.  I’ll forgive you your male inadequacies.”  But there’s no bite, no personal insult, in that statement, simply a piece of cop-flavoured dark humour, and Castle treats it as it deserves, bringing her head down to kiss her and taking the opportunity to pinch her ass in revenge.  Matters progress in a rather predictable fashion, from there, and leave them curled up together in sleep.

* * *

 

The sharp stiletto of absolute terror wakes Castle the next morning.  It takes him a moment to realise that it’s been caused by the empty space next to him and the rather unpleasant remnants of an inchoate nightmare mainly featuring the absence of Beckett, over and over: because she’s hurt, because she’s too busy at work – because she’s left him.  The only variant it was missing was because she’s dead.  That thought really does not improve his view of the day, or of the gap beside him.  He takes a few deep breaths, and tries to clear his head and slow his pulse.  When he peers at his watch on the nightstand it’s well after nine, and common sense, slowly returning, tells him that Beckett, being a far-too-early bird for his liking, is probably inhaling her third cup of coffee and sitting outside.

He lies back and considers.  Beckett knows the worst of it, now.  Nothing else was ever quite that bad.  She hasn’t run away.  He thinks for a moment.  Actually, it’s never been his history that’s made her run away: it’s always been her own demons she’s run from.  So he should tell her the rest, today, and then make sure that she’s had her chance to tell him everything – if indeed there is really anything more.  He pauses on that thought.  He knows about her mother, about Sorenson, about her father, about Kiev.   She’s told him that his books saved her, though he finds that more than a little hard to believe: he expects she would have saved herself.  Alcohol wouldn’t have defeated her.

But.  But, although she thinks she’s told him it all, she’d rather skated over that first, unhappy, failed relationship in college: in particular its ending.  And she hasn’t told him what the nightmare was about, though he thinks he knows.  There’s only one context in which Beckett uses  _cinnamon_ and it has nothing to do with cooking at all.  He bounces out of bed, liberated by his confessions of the night before and by his current thinking, and hurries to shower and dress.

He finds Beckett just starting to scribble a note.

“What’s that, Beckett?”  She jumps.

“You’re awake.  We need food.  And we’re out of coffee.  I’m going to town to stock up.  I was leaving you a note.”  Note?  Good grief.  Communication and consideration of his likely feelings on finding her missing?  Mark it on the calendar.  That’s not very fair, he realises.  Till he got here and yelled at her she had no idea how much he felt.  Till he told her his past she’d have had no idea what finding her missing and her car gone might have done to him.

“No coffee?”

“No.  Finished the last of it this morning.”  Castle pouts unhappily.

“What will I drink?”

“You could come to the store with me and help.”  Pout is replaced by smile.

“Sure.  We could take my car.”  Beckett looks confused. 

“Why?  I know the way.  You don’t, really.”

“I want to drive.  You never let me drive if it’s your car.  It’s my turn, anyway.”  He smiles more hopefully.  “C’mon, Beckett.  Turnabout’s fair play.”  He’s absolutely flabbergasted when she nods once.

“Okay, Castle.  You can drive.”

Beckett looks at his rental car with some disfavour.  Admittedly, it’s a bit muddy, and it has all the horsepower of an arthritic pony, but it’s not that bad.

“These are your wheels, Castle?  Really?”

“No.  I rented it to come up here.  If you’d seen my car you’d have known I was here.”  He grins proudly.  “Can’t miss a scarlet Ferrari.”  The grin diminishes.  “Besides which, this driveway would have damaged the suspension.”

“You have a Ferrari?”  Castle nods.  “I wanna drive it.  I’ve never driven a Ferrari.  That’s even better than my motorbike.”  Castle chokes, then his eyes light up. 

“You have a motorbike?”  Beckett nods.  She spots an opportunity to make a deal.

“A Harley.”

“I wanna ride it.  I’ve never ridden a Harley.”

“Deal, then.  I get to drive your Ferrari and you get to ride my Harley.”  Suddenly her face changes.  “You have ridden motorbikes before, haven’t you?”

“Yes.  I won’t break your toy.  Have you driven performance cars?”

“Yes.  I won’t break yours, either.”  And somewhere in each of their words they both hear _I won’t break you._   Or possibly _I’ll try to share_.  Or both.

* * *

 

Domestic chores and shopping companionably done, lunch eaten, and a comfortable position outside established, Castle launches himself into the last piece of his story, not without some trepidation – not, this time, about his own story, but about what he’ll have to ask Beckett when he’s done.  Festering in the back of his brain is the idea that she might have forgotten this part of her story for a reason.  His fertile imagination and his own history can provide him with many unpleasant reasons why she might have forgotten.

“So after Meredith” – he manages to say that without a hitch – “Alexis and Mother and I got along quite well.  I wrote, and brought Alexis up.  Took her to the park, did the school run, everything.  It’s amazing, how popular a man looking after his own child is.”  His lips twist in an ugly grimace.  “Really quite amazing.  Bored Manhattan moms looking for an affair, lonely divorcees ditto.  I could have had a very active social life.”  Yes.  Castle had hinted at that, back when.  He’d used a rather different tone about it, too, back when he was still playing the arrogant jackass.  “So many of them tried to butter me up by flattering Alexis that it became embarrassing.   It was easier just to flirt back and slide away from anything else.  You know.  Meaningless words and no action.  When Alexis was about six, though, I thought she might need a” – he smiles wryly – “rather more normal female role model than my mother.” 

Beckett grins in return.  Martha is probably an excellent role model for certain things.  One of which is certainly how to be a _good_ single mom and actress.  Indeed, judging by the real, family oriented Castle, a good mom, full stop.  But theirs is not quite a usual family set up, even now, and she can see where Castle’s coming from.  One spectacularly theatrical diva in the family is probably quite enough.

“So I went out a bit more, which pleased Paula – my PR rep – and Gina – my editor.  I didn’t find anyone that I thought would suit us, though.”  That’s a bit cold, Castle; picking women on the grounds of their ability to fit in to your rather unconventional family.  What happened to – well, love?  Beckett stops hard.  Why on earth is she thinking that Castle would be looking for love, given the history he’s relayed?  Hmm.  He’d already grown his shell.  Full-formed shield, immediately upon Meredith’s departure, she reckons.

“Gradually I noticed I was spending a lot of time with Gina.  She liked Alexis, but didn’t gush; I liked her, and she liked me.  It made good sense.  So we decided to get married.  I thought – well.  I thought that since it wasn’t a blazing romantic affair, but we seemed to be pretty compatible, it would work out.”  Beckett doesn’t imagine that this was true, but keeps quiet.  “And for a while it did.  But though she was good to Alexis, and tried really hard to be her mom, Alexis would always run to me no matter how hard Gina and I tried to show a united front.  And then Gina’s a bit of a control freak.”  So is Beckett, of course.  Not just a bit, in her case, and she doesn’t bother hiding it.  She knows this. Beckett thinks cynically that Castle’s PR shell is a control freak’s nightmare.  But she thinks she can deal with that, if he can.  Because he’s pretty much a control freak, himself, and now she knows why.

“And while I didn’t care if she was a control freak about most things that didn’t involve us” – and there’s half his problem, right there: Gina wasn’t a part of the _us_ that he’s just used –“she wanted to control how and what I wrote.  So it didn’t work out, really.  But she’s still a damn good editor, so we managed an amicable divorce – apart from the alimony: that was worse than negotiating her share of the royalties, though I think in her mind it’s the same thing” – Beckett snickers – “and kept working together.”

A passing breeze ruffles Beckett’s hair and makes her shiver slightly.  Castle pulls her a little closer and she snuggles in, content.

“So I just stuck to writing and whatever publicity Gina and Paula told me would sell books.  Except tours.  I was pretty strict about tours.  Outside school semesters, so Alexis could come, and not long.  PR is all about signings and launch parties and so forth, and it’s really easy to look like you’re sociable” – that’s one way of putting it, Beckett thinks – “without needing to do too much.  Page six will make it up for you, most of the time.”

“And signing chests?”

“Lots of PR, for no involvement.”  There’s an evil grin.  “And some of them were really well-endowed.”  Beckett growls.  Which of course has nothing to do with her lack of – er – endowment.

“Bit immature, Castle.”

“Scientific research.”

“What?”

“Scientific research,” he says again, smirking.  “I never knew silicone had so many different forms.”  Beckett gives up trying to be serious and laughs outright.

“And then you showed up.  The rest you know.  And here we are.”  He turns fully into her, swings her legs over his lap and kisses her hard.  “I’m still here.”  There’s a definite pause in proceedings, while Castle shows her just how much he’s still here.  When that’s finished, though, there’s a much less pleasant pause.  Castle’s clearly chewing over a thought and doesn’t like its flavour.  But that’s not where he starts.

“I think I’ve told you everything.  Is there anything else you want to know?” Beckett shakes her head.   He’s turned his head, and history, inside out.  He’s turned his whole self inside out, just for her.  She’s about to tell him so when he speaks again.

“Beckett.”  That doesn’t sound good.  That’s a heavy, portent-laden tone.  She tenses.  “You said I knew everything about you.”  Well, yes.  She can’t think of anything she’s deliberately left out.  “I don’t think that’s true.”  What?  That came straight out of left field.  It is true.  There’s nothing else.  How can he think she’s lying?  She’s now thoroughly stiff and unyielding, pulling away slightly so that she can look at his face.

“I haven’t left out anything,” she snaps.

“You don’t think you have.  Just like I didn’t think I had.  Till you pulled me up on it.  My turn.”  He draws a deep breath.  “Tell me about the guy in college.”

“I did.  He thought he could tell me what to do, so I kicked him to the kerb.  He didn’t like it and kept trying to get back with me.  I made sure he couldn’t.”

“Beckett…c’mon.  That’s not a story.  That’s four sentences, skipping over all the drama.  I think there’s more to it.”  Another deep breath.  “I think it’s connected to your nightmare.”  She startles, and he draws his bow at a venture.  “Was that the only nightmare?”

“No.  But it was just a nightmare.  Nothing more.  I’ve never had it before.”

Castle considers, just for a moment.  It seems to him that Beckett’s nightmare was non-coincidentally close to the point at which she’d just walked away from a second relationship in which she’d indulged her bedroom predilections.  She’d said that Sorenson had been pretty plain vanilla.  She’s still talking.  “It was only when I got here.”  _Yeah, Beckett.  Only when you stopped and your brain caught up with the lack of homicides to focus on.  You can keep going for ever, as long as you don’t stop.  It’s when you stop that everything you’re running from catches up with you.  And, Beckett, you haven’t really stopped for ten years, have you?  Running from your mom’s case, sure, but are you running from something else as well?_

“Okay,” he says appeasingly.  “But you still skated over that guy.  You said you wanted to do this right, Beckett.  So do I.  Your turn.”

There’s an uncomfortably long silence, during which Castle has plenty of time to think that he’s made a massive leap into the ravine of misjudgement.  He last saw Beckett this frozen at approximately the moment he said _It’s about your mother_.  So he’s hit something.  The only question is what.  But… she hasn’t – yet – moved out of the crook of his arm, though that might only be a matter of time.  When it seems clear she’s not saying anything he pushes harder.

“Tell me about the nightmare, then.  Even if it was only a nightmare.  You _fainted_.”

“Did not,” Beckett contradicts, remarkably, and suspiciously, quickly.  Castle looks at her with his best _I-know-you’re-lying_ expression, honed to a fine edge on both Alexis and his mother, and watches the tell-tale blush spread along Beckett’s sharp-cut cheekbones.

“Nightmare, Beckett.  Fainting.  We agreed no secrets any more.  No bear traps for either of us to fall into unwittingly. Talk.”

Nightmare.  Okay.  She can do that.  It was just a dream.  Nothing to get hung up about.

“It started off like just another dream.  No name, no face.  Just like it always used to be.  But whoever it was wouldn’t stop when I used my safe word,” she blurts out in a rush of words.  Castle doesn’t say anything.  He’s too busy parsing out that very inadequate description.  He does tighten his arm, though.  Not that it seems to make any difference.  When he’s finished fleshing it out in his own mind, he’s got some more questions, leading up to the key one.  Start more gently.

“What do you mean, _used to be_?”  He’s watching Beckett very carefully.  He has a strong suspicion that this might have been her solution to a solitary life.  In which case…

“Until you showed up,” she mutters, not looking at him.  Ah.  Right.  That’s something he could usefully have known the day after he’d met her.  Life would have been a lot more hopeful if he had.  _Focus, Rick.  What’s past is past._   Still.  Her dreams changed after he showed up?  Wow.

“But you never dreamed it before now?”  There’s a headshake against his arm.  _Here we go…_

“Why’d you faint, if it were just a nightmare?”  Back to complete stillness.  If it weren’t Beckett, he’d be sure she was winding up to flee.  Actually… that’s not that unlikely.  _She only runs from her own demons_.  If she runs… is the best thing to stop her running or to go after her or to wait for her to come back?  Definitely not the last.  She’ll never come back.

She doesn’t run.

“I was stressed, and I hadn’t eaten.  The dream was so real.  And then you were shaking my shoulders and leaning over me and it all got too much.”   She sounds completely convinced of that.  If only Castle were.  He leaves it.  She’s too sure of her answer for him to push it further.  She carries on.  “It hasn’t happened again.  I’m fine.”  That’s her reply to everything, fine or not.  Back to the original issue – and how is it that he’s interrogating her: that he can’t just let her tell him in her own time?  That’s what fucked this up last time, and here he’s just about to make the same mistake again.

“Beckett… You don’t have to talk about it right now.  But sometime, you need to tell me about the guy in college.  Please?”

“Later.  I will.  Not now.”  It’s something she’s spent a lot of time forgetting, and now she’s going to have to remember.  But the nightmare’s just a nightmare, because that’s not how it went down.  And he deserves to know.  He’s told her everything.

“What do you want for dinner?”  It’s a distraction, and a deferment.  She knows that it’s only temporary.  But she’ll need some wine to get through this one.  She’d really thought she’d got past it; that it didn’t matter.  It’s why she’d skipped over it.  It – the detail - wasn’t important any more.  _But if it weren’t important you could talk about it without alcohol to smooth the way, Kate.  It is important.  Even if it’s not a problem any more, the consequences will be if you don’t talk._  

Dinner consists of stir-fried chicken and vegetables, with rice.   Pasta has not figured in today’s shopping.  There are enough bad memories circling around the cabin without inviting them in.  Beckett can see Castle noticing that she’s putting away rather more wine than normal, but he’s not saying anything at all about it.  He’s very obviously waiting for her to talk, though.

_Here goes nothing._


	79. All you need is love

“It was at NYU.  I met this guy.  We got on pretty well.  I’d have seen it sooner, if my dad hadn’t been such a worry.  But I was trying to help my dad, and failing, and he” – Castle correctly deduces that to mean the ex –“was at least making sure I ate, and slept.  But then it all started to get too much.”  Ah.  The road to hell is paved with good intentions.  Castle’s good intentions very much included.

“I knew what I liked, by then.  He was right in that zone.  We got serious, and it was all good.  So I thought.  It took me a while to realise that I wasn’t seeing much of my other friends.  Somehow there was always something else we had to be doing, or somewhere to be where my pals didn’t hang out.  It wasn’t overt, because I was spending so much time on my dad that there wasn’t much time left over anyway.  But I felt a little guilty if I wasn’t with him, and he didn’t seem comfortable with them.  Still, other things made up for it.”  Castle feels a hot wash of jealousy, and forcibly reminds himself that a failed relationship more than ten years ago is no threat to them now.

“But then I noticed he was a little slow on the safe word.”  Ah, thinks Castle.  Cinnamon dreams.  “I called him on it, and it got better. For a while.”  Castle moves his hands out of sight.  Beckett watching them clench into fists is really not likely to help.  Everybody knows that if you’re going to play those games you absolutely have to trust in the safe word.  If someone starts messing with that… well, _shit._   No wonder plain vanilla Sorenson had been the first for a while.  Much more fundamentally, he wonders how she brought herself to trust him.  In the covering dark he can’t see her face clearly.  More importantly, she can’t see him.  He strongly believes that she’ll only get through this tale if she can’t see him, doesn’t remember he’s there.  He pulls in his personality and aura, and stays still and silent.

“Eventually it got suffocating.  He was always there; I never seemed to get any space.  He called it _taking care of me_.  It all came to a head when I registered for the Academy.  He didn’t like it.  I told him it wasn’t negotiable: that was what I was doing.  He tried to tell me I couldn’t.  I told him to get out my apartment and never come back.  Then I sat down and thought about the previous six months and realised what he’d been trying to do. In his screwed-up mind, taking care meant he had to take control, because he didn’t think I could take care of myself.  He thought because I liked it in bed I’d like it other times.  I wasn’t having that.  No way.”  She pauses, and drinks most of the remains of her glass of wine; refills it and drinks another goodly portion of that glassful.

Castle thinks that while Beckett had done exactly what he’d have bet on her doing as soon as she realised, her ex didn’t have the only mind that was screwed up about the difference between care and control.  Her therapy hadn’t gone half far enough.

 “After I ditched him he started hassling me about getting back together, he’d change, it’d all be okay.  I wasn’t having any of it.  One evening, he pushed his way into my apartment to try to _convince_ me.”  She pauses.  “When he put his hands on my shoulders – well. It wasn’t pretty.”  There’s a vicious, entirely humourless baring of teeth.  “I wanted to kill him.  All the anger about my mom and with my dad just spilled over.  I really lost it.  He left with a black eye and damn near a broken nose, and I’ll bet a lot of other hurt.  I never saw him again.”  Castle puts it all together in fractions of a second.  It was only a nightmare, with no reality behind it.  But when he’d put hands on her to wake her it had flipped her back to this other event.  Even if she doesn’t know it.  He supposes he was lucky not to have his nose broken.  Beckett takes a much smaller mouthful of wine, while he’s thinking.

“But after that I didn’t get involved.  Too busy at the Academy; too busy trying to save my dad, until I realised I couldn’t manage that: only he could save himself and I was going to drown myself trying; then too busy being a cop.  I really respected my training officer, so I worked my ass off.  And it kept me from having to think about anything else.  There was no time for anything else, and all that anger got poured into solving crime, where it could be useful.  Then Sorenson showed up, and you know how that played out.   I went back to being a cop.  Both times it was a lot easier to leave it behind than to try to work out what went wrong.   What I did wrong.”  He can almost hear her mouth snap shut on that.  He is perfectly certain that that was two sentences more than she wanted to say.

“I need some space.”  She’s gone from the room almost before the words have left her lips.  It’s utterly predictable.  He hears feet on the stairs and a door shut.  No point in following.  She’s said she needs room.  She’d told him yesterday that she would need room, and she wouldn’t always know when.  Well, he can give her room, if she’s not running, because she’s unknowingly told him something he’s barely able to believe, given the way she’d behaved for most of the last four months.  She’s told him, quite, quite unwittingly, that she’d trusted him in bed almost from the very beginning.  Which means that, however much she’d distracted, deferred and downright denied, she’d felt more for him from moment one than she’d ever admitted to him.

Or, it occurs to him, than she had ever admitted to herself.  Well.  He understands where she was at, now.  Blind to her own damage: too many betrayals, too close together.  Too much to deal with, and never unpicked.  If she hadn’t had a murdered mother, or an alcoholic father; she’d not have fallen into a dysfunctional relationship.  Or she’d have recovered from it, as most people can, if they get themselves out of it.  If she hadn’t had a murdered mother, Sorenson would never have treated her like a victim.  Though he’d still have been a jerk.  And if all that hadn’t happened, she might not have spent so much time trying to avoid a relationship. It’s perfectly clear why she did, though. 

He’d come off too much like that guy in senior year: fitted her in bed, wouldn’t leave her alone, followed her around to get his own way. _Ouch_.  No wonder she’d stayed emotionally backed off; pushed him away.  She hadn’t really moved forward till – till he’d started to show her he could, and would, step back.  Till he’d told her, with absolute sincerity, he would leave, and never come back, if that’s what she wanted; till they’d defined _taking care_ to exclude anything that might pull her unconscious and conscious triggers; till he’d stepped back on the kidnap case to do the best for the child, not him or his ego or her.  Only then had she started to believe he was different, and then really to trust him in more ways than for sex.

It took both of them to mess this up.  Two damaged, defective people, pretending that they were okay, ignoring their own issues and history.  One killing herself with work, one killing his better self with indifference to anything outside his door.  One who thought he could have anything he wanted, one who didn’t allow herself to want anything.  One whose life is on page six, and one who hides in the shadows.  One who’d just about brought herself to admit that she could trust him, and one who’d just about brought himself to admit he could love this woman; in both cases, in complete defiance of experience and common sense.  Somehow, they’ve solved each other; dovetailed into each other’s gaps.  The attraction of complete opposites.

* * *

 

Upstairs, Beckett is trying to recover some composure and failing miserably.  In short, she’s panicking: leaning out of the window, balanced on the sill, (well, white-knuckle gripping, if she were honest) gulping in the night air heedless of how many small flying things she might be inhaling.  She hates to remember how stupid and naïve she’d been; she hates to remember how she couldn’t save her father for five years; she’s spent the best part of ten years or so deliberately forgetting how she’d completely lost her temper into a black fog of fury and when she’d come out it she’d found that she’d beaten the crap out of a man who was, in theory, larger and stronger than she.  (Not by much, though.  Not like Castle.)  She hates to remember that in those days she had been so angry, with no outlet.  Now she channels it into fighting killers, and she’s never lost it like that again.  Not physically, anyway.  She cringes as she remembers some of the words she’s used to Castle, to try to make him back away.  Now he’s seen that she’s not just capable of verbal venom, but physical, he’s likely having second thoughts, whatever he’s said in the last ten days.  He hasn’t repeated it, since then.  Not since she started to open up.  Not since he did.  She comes away from the window and curls up around a pillow, trying to clear her head.

 _Think, Kate_. _Might be a good start, rather than just reacting._   Castle came here.  Despite all her words.  And it’s not as if she hasn’t, in fact, been more than just verbally venomous: she slapped him.  She’s not proud of that.  Not at all.  Though what he’d said…  _Past, Kate.  You’ve got past that._  

And even if she ever did lose it;  which is an absolutely ridiculous thought because she hasn’t ever lost it like that again no matter what the provocation; he’s big enough that she can’t do him serious damage, because she knows that he can stop her.  _A man who can take her down in a fight._   She just hadn’t realised why she needed that.  And he may not have said those terrifying words a second time, but then she’s not exactly using them either.  Which promptly panics her all over again.  The pillow whumphs in complaint at the force of her grip.

Gradually she stops panicking.  He’s here.  He’s heard the worst of her story.  He’s shared his story, which certainly isn’t pretty but explains everything.  He hasn’t run for the hills.  _Man up, Kate._   Time to stop running away and leaving things behind, rather than trying to make it work.

Time to stop running.

* * *

 

Castle moves to the couch, switches on the lights, sips the remains of his wine, peruses a handy book, and waits.  And, after longer than he’d like but a shorter time than he expected, Beckett does come back.  He’d have to admit he’s relieved, even if she said she wasn’t running.  But… she’s collected her wine, come directly to the couch, and she’s sitting down as close as possible without actually sitting on his lap.  Not that he’d object if she did.  He compromises with an arm firmly round her shoulders and a gentle tug towards him, which has the desired effect.  Beckett curls into him, though it’s noticeable that she’s hidden her face against his shoulder, and although it’s faintly possible that high-wires are more tense than she, he really doesn’t think that’s true.  Extremely slowly, it occurs to him that she’s worried about his reaction to what she’s told him.

He sets his own wine down, plucks hers away to a safe location, and hoists her into his lap; pets her gently and soothes the tension away.  Mostly.

“You’re thinking too loud.”  He tips her chin up to see her expression, and prevents her automatic movement back down.  “Stop thinking that you’ve put me off.”  There’s a flash of guilt across her face, and he pulls her tight in, still stroking her back softly.  “You can fight as hard as you need to, with me.”  She relaxes a little more.  “I’ll still be here.”  There’s a soft breath below his chin.

“I knew you had a past.  I’ve got a past.  So what?  The whole point about the past is that it _is_ past.”  He smiles, open and relaxed and not worried at all.  Because she came back down, and sat beside him, and hasn’t run.

“Stop fighting the past, Beckett.  The fighting’s done, and we’re still here.  We can simply start clean, here and now.”

Beckett nods, slowly.  “Okay.  Let’s do that.”  There’s a long silence, during which she relaxes fully into Castle’s body and he loosens his arms.  Finally she looks up into his face and smiles openly and in a way he hasn’t previously seen: unbarriered, unrestricted.  Then she smirks, very evilly.

“I think I’d prefer to start dirty.”  It takes Castle an instant to understand what she’s just said.  Then he acquires an identically evil expression.

“I think we can arrange that, Beckett.”  He runs one hand into the soft hair at the nape of her neck, and spans long fingers around so that she’s held at a convenient angle.  Her hands come up to his shoulders, bite in.  His kiss is leisurely, sure, and utterly possessive.  His other hand slides over her hip, keeping her against him, his little finger rests on the outside of her thigh, stroking slowly at the edge of her shorts, flicking over smooth skin.  She tweaks his shirt buttons open, running her nails lightly over his bared collarbones; a little hint of things to come.  He kisses harder, deeper; searching and finding domination of her mouth, pulling back to nip her lower lip and move to her neck.

“Mine, Beckett,” he murmurs against her ear, and flickers a wicked tongue around the shell.  “You’re all mine.”  She slides a slim hand down between them, and stops slightly north of where she should.

“Yours, Castle?  I think you might be _mine_.”  She puts considerable emphasis on the last word.  He’s not the only one who can use that phrase to mean far more than it seems to.  Her hand moves the crucial distance lower, and his response is lost in a sharp breath.  “You admitted it.”

“True,” he says smugly, recovering far too rapidly.  “But so did you.  And you admitted it first.  Possession is nine points of the law.”  Beckett splutters.

“I’m the law.”

“Yeah, and I fought the law and I won.”  There’s another splutter, with considerably more disgust.

“Misquoting the Clash, Castle?  That’s low.  Even for you, that’s low.”  Castle produces a lazy, sensual smile.

“You’re not disagreeing, though.”  He kisses her neck, and makes her wriggle.  “Like I said, possession is nine points of the law.  You’re the law, and I’ve got possession.”  He tightens his arms, to prove it.

“That makes no sense at all,” Beckett complains petulantly.  “That sounds like a foreclosure.  Are you saying I’m a house?”  Castle doesn’t even think before his mouth opens.

“You’re home.”  There’s a stunned silence.  “You’re mine and you’re home and I am not leaving you.”

Beckett is currently producing a very creditable impression of a stranded codfish.  Castle takes wholly unfair advantage of her lack of argument and kisses her, taking her mouth in a way that leaves her even less able to think than she was a moment ago.  When he lifts off her lips she’s still gaping.

“Beckett?”  There’s no answer.  He repeats her name, to as little effect.  Despite her position no more than six inches away, she appears not to have heard anything.  He tries a drastic solution.  “Kate?”

“Huh?”  It’s Castle’s turn to gape, mainly because he’s still alive.  She appears to recover some elements of composure and notices his dropped jaw.  “What?”

“You just let me call you Kate.”

“I did?”  She did?  When did she do that?  She doesn’t remember that.  “Oh,” she says weakly.  And then, hardly more strongly, “B…but you can’t.”  Castle’s still staring at her, and she realises that that statement makes no sense either.  Neither of them appear to be able to construct a coherent sentence right now.  Naturally, Castle recovers first.  Typical.  Damn his writer’s curiosity prodding him into intelligence before she’s straightened out her own head.

“Why not?”  It’s a question for which Beckett has no answer at all, except possibly _because you don’t_ , which is unhelpful to say the least.  She sits in paralysed silence.

Castle, in an unusual concession to common sense where Beckett is concerned, doesn’t ask further.  In any event, he’s got better things to do.  He sets Beckett on her feet, stands himself, and carefully walks her backwards to his room.  When he kisses her again, it appears to cure paralysis.

“Where were we, Beckett?  Before that interesting digression?”  He slides a slow hand up the back of her t-shirt, taking the fabric with him, and pauses as he reaches the clasp of her bra.

“Starting dirty,” Beckett says silkily, clearly fully aware of her surroundings once more.  Very clearly aware, from the fact that her hand has just pushed his shirt off his shoulders and she’s just nipped his lip.  He runs his thumb down her spine and up again, very slowly, and then unclips her bra.  She gasps against his shoulder, and bites down on the hard muscle there, runs her tongue lightly across the mark.  He lets his shirt fall away, and peels hers off with the bra, presses her into him with a wide palm across her back, brings his other hand to slip into her hair and angle her head for his leisurely, searching, possessive exploration.  He releases her slightly only to have space to run fingers round her waist and flick her shorts open, tease her momentarily with one long digit and then push the remains of her clothing away to leave her naked in his grasp.

“That’s better.  Just the way you like to be.   Naked and” – he slips his hand down her back and between her legs to cup her – “wet and _all mine_.”  She’s sure he’s said that before.  If she could think, she might remember when.  But she doesn’t remember it sounding like that, before.  She doesn’t remember it meaning _I love you_. 

Being naked while he’s still partly dressed dampens her further: makes her recall that he’s bigger and stronger and taking charge.   She squirms against his fingertips and feels him thick and hot against her: brings her hand to the buckle of his belt and starts her own in-depth explorations.  She doesn’t expect to get very far, and she’s not wrong.   She has, in fact, quite consciously invited exactly what happens, which is both her wrists held behind her back in Castle’s large hand. 

He lowers her on to the bed and follows her down, ignoring her complaints about his still-clad state.  And then he spends a considerable amount of quality time ensuring that she has no ability to complain or even speak beyond the single word _please_ at all, and that they both enjoy every last second of it.

She’s curled right into him, soft and pliant and purring and oh-so-definitely _his_ now, and he has to make sure that they both know it.

“Mine, Kate.  Just like I’m yours.”

From somewhere south of his shoulder, there’s a small noise.  It doesn’t sound like contented purring any more, unhappily.

“I didn’t want you to call me Kate.”  Okay, left field calling.  “I didn’t want you that close, at first.  And then when I did it all went wrong anyway because I thought you were just like the others and it was another disaster all over again.”  Castle cuddles her in, and waits for the next piece of thinking.  “As long as you didn’t, I didn’t have to think that it meant anything.”  She clearly feels the reflexive wince.  “I could keep lying to myself about everything.”  Castle is suddenly paying very close attention.  “I could keep pretending this was something I could walk away from without getting hurt.”  He’d swear he could hear the air forming words in her larynx.

“I could pretend I wasn’t in love with you.” 

He’s tightened his grip before she’s finished the _l_ , because she absolutely does not get to throw that out and run away and he can feel the bunching of her muscles and sure enough she’s already trying to move.

“Nuh-uh.  You’re not leaving.”  Her face is buried in his chest.  If he didn’t have firm hold of her, she’d already be a mile down the road and accelerating, still terrified of what she’s admitting.  “You don’t get to say that and run.  You’re my badass Beckett, and my Kate, and my love.” 

And just like that she stops fighting and lets him pull her up so he can see her face and kiss her and keep her in the protective, possessive, _loving_ hold that she could stay in for ever.

“In the precinct, you still call me Beckett, okay?”  She sees the mischief rising in his eyes and slaps a hand over his mouth.  When he draws a sensual pattern over her palm with his tongue and then licks wetly over it she struggles to remember what she wants to say.

“But outside – you can call me Kate.  Call me Kate, Castle.”  He logs the way _Kate Castle_ feels on his ears, and says nothing about it.  Then.

* * *

 

Some years later, he reminds her of her phrasing that night, when for the first time he calls her Kate Castle.

**FINIS**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading.


End file.
